BL  80  . M66  1923 
Moore,  George  Foot,  1851- 
1931 . 

The  birth  and  growth  of 
religion 


THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH 
OF  RELIGION 


THE  MORSE  LECTURES 


PUBLISHED  BY  CHARLES  SCRIBNER’S  SONS 

THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION. 

By  George  Foot  Moore,  D.D.,  Litt.D., 
LL.D. 

MIND  AND  CONDUCT.  By  HENRY  RuT- 
ger8  Marshall*  L.H.D.,  D.S. 

THE  CRITICISM  OF  THE  FOURTH  GOSPEL. 

By  William  Sanday,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

THE  PLACE  OF  CHRIST  IN  MODERN  THEOL¬ 
OGY.  By  A.  M.  Fairbairn,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

THE  RELIGIONS  OF  JAPAN.  By  WlLLIAM 
Elliot  Griffis. 

THE  WHENCE  AND  THE  WHITHER  OF  MAN. 

By  Professor  John  M.  Tyler. 

THE  CHRISTIAN  CONQUEST  OF  ASIA.  By 
John  Henry  Barrows,  D.D. 

DEVELOPMENT  OF  RELIGION  AND 
THOUGHT  IN  ANCIENT  EGYPT,  By  James 
Henry  Breasted,  Ph.D. 


THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH 
OF  RELIGION 


GEORGE  FOOT  MOORE 


PROFESSOR  OF  THE  HISTORY  OF  RELIGION  IN  HARVARD  UNIVERSITY 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER’S  SONS 


Copyright,  1923,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER’S  SONS 

Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


Published  September,  1923 


TO  MY  PUPILS 

“i  HAVE  LEARNED  MUCH  FROM  MY  TEACHERS, 
STILL  MORE  FROM  MY  COLLEAGUES,  BUT  FROM 
MY  PUPILS  MORE  THAN  FROM  ALL  OF  THEM.” 

— Rabbi. 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/birthgrowthofrelOOmoor 


PREFACE 


This  volume  contains  eight  lectures  delivered  in 
Union  Theological  Seminary  in  1922  on  the  Morse 
Foundation.  In  preparing  them  for  the  press  their 
original  form  has  been  substantially  preserved;  only 
that  some  of  the  chapters  have  been  expanded,  and 
the  whole  revised. 

What  I  have  tried  to  do  is  to  set  forth,  in  brief, 
opinions  about  the  evolution  of  religion  formed  in 
the  course  of  a  good  many  years’  occupation  with 
the  subject.  I  have  not  undertaken  to  enumerate 
and  describe  in  any  detail  the  phenomena,  much 
less  to  discuss  general  theories  or  explanatory  hy¬ 
potheses.  A  reader  who  desires  more  particular 
information  on  such  matters  may  be  referred  to 
the  learned,  lucid,  and  judicious  Introduction  to  the 
History  of  Religions,  by  Professor  Crawford  H.  Toy 
(1913:  Harvard  University  Press),  or  the  recent  ex¬ 
cellent  work  of  Professor  E.  Washburn  Hopkins,  of 
Yale  University,  Origin  and  Evolution  of  Religion 
(Yale  University  Press,  1923),  and  to  the  relevant 

articles  in  The  Encyclopaedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics . 

vii 


PREFACE 


•  •  • 
vm 

The  first  of  these  has  an  extensive  classified  bibliog¬ 
raphy;  The  Encyclopedia  also  cites  the  literature 
amply.  This  also  I  have  thought  it  unnecessary  to 
repeat. 

In  a  book  like  this,  which  presents  in  small  compass 
the  outcome  of  academic  lectures  that  have  been 
worked  over  and  recast  many  times  in  the  course  of 
twenty-five  years,  it  would  be  impossible  to  specify 
in  references  my  indebtedness  to  individuals.  It 
will  not,  I  hope,  be  set  down  to  ingratitude  if  I 
acknowledge  in  this  geperal  way  my  obligation  to 
the  many  who  have  collected  and  digested  sources, 
or  discussed  the  subject  from  the  anthropological  or 
the  philosophical  side. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  Antecedents  and  Rudiments  ...  1 

II.  Souls  and  Spirits . 21 

lit  The  Emergence  of  Gods  ....  43 

IV.  Morals  and  Religion . 64 

V.  Religions  of  Higher  Civilizations  .  77 

VI.  After  Death . 105 

VII.  Ways  of  Salvation . 128 


VIII.  Salvation:  Religion  and  Philosophy  147 


THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH 
OF  RELIGION 


CHAPTER  I 

ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 

It  is  now  the  prevailing  opinion  among  anthropolo¬ 
gists  that  religion  in  some  form  or  other  is  universal. 
Explorers  have  indeed  frequently  brought  back  ac¬ 
counts  of  peoples  that  have  no  religion  at  all,  but 
more  thorough  investigation  has  not  sustained  the 
report.  In  many  cases  the  error  arose  from  inade¬ 
quate  observation.  A  traveller,  wTho  had  perhaps 
spent  but  a  few  weeks  with  a  tribe,  did  not  see  any¬ 
thing  that  he  recognized  as  religious,  and  hastily 
inferred  that  what  he  had  not  seen  or  did  not  recog¬ 
nize  did  not  exist.  Better  informed  observers  have 
often  defined  religion  in  such  a  way  as  to  exclude  the 
phenomena  they  described,  as  when  one  wrote  of  a 
tribe  with  which  he  was  well  acquainted  that  they 
had  no  religion — they  worshipped  devils.  Some  an¬ 
thropologists,  again,  have  drawn  the  line  between 

y  magic  and  religion  so  as  to  leave  to  a  large  part  of 

1 


2  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


the  population  of  the  globe  only  the  former.  To 
avoid  controversy  about  definitions  we  may  content 
ourselves  here  with  saying  that  no  people  or  tribe 
has  been  discovered  which  has  not  something  that 
answers  for  it  the  purposes  of  religion,  whether  we 
think  it  respectable  enough  to  be  dignified  by  that 
name  or  not. 

The  testimony  of  history  as  far  back  as  it  goes  is 
the  same.  The  ancient  civilizations,  when  they 
emerge  on  the  horizon  of  our  knowledge,  possessed 
religions  in  a  stage  for  which  indefinite  centuries  of 
development  must  be  inferred  in  prehistoric  ages 
over  which  archaeological  evidence  dimly  prolongs 
our  vista.  The  records  of  Egypt  and  of  Babylon 
and  Assyria  give  many  glimpses  of  the  religions  of 
the  nations  with  which  they  came  into  contact. 
From  Greek  historians  and  geographers  we  have  ac¬ 
counts  not  only  of  the  religions  of  the  civilized 
peoples  of  their  times,  but  of  many  barbarous  tribes 
in  all  parts  of  their  world.  They  nowhere  discovered 
irreligious  men. 

The  antiquity  thus  in  some  measure  disclosed  to 
us  reaches  at  the  utmost  to  a  past  of  less  than  ten 
thousand  years,  a  brief  span  of  time  compared  with 
the  thousands  of  centuries  in  which  geologists  and 
biologists  now  estimate  the  age  of  humankind 
on  the  earth.  The  biologist  assumes  that  in  the 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


3 


process  of  evolution  the  genus  which  boastfully  la¬ 
bels  itself  homo  sapiens  had  anthropoid  ancestors 
who  had  neither  religion  nor  language.  With  them 
we  are  not  concerned.  Whether  palaeolithic  man, 
as  archaeology  discovers  him  already  possessed  of 
various  arts,  some  of  which  he  had  brought  to  high 
perfection,  had  also  developed  a  religion  is  an  in¬ 
quiry  into  which  we  cannot  enter  here.  It  must 
suffice  to  say  that  existing  races  on  a  lower  plane  of 
culture  have  religions  whose  present  state  implies 
long  antecedents,  and  that  among  the  remains  of 
palaeolithic  culture  in  some  regions  objects  are  pre¬ 
served  which,  if  they  were  modern,  would  unhesi¬ 
tatingly  be  interpreted  as  religious. 

The  universality  of  religion  within  the  range  of 
our  knowledge  warrants  the  inference  that  it  has 
its  origin  in  a  common  motive,  and  the  identity  of 
the  elementary  notions  that  everywhere  go  with  it 
implies  that  they  are  man’s  natural  response  to  his 
environment  and  experience. 

The  origin  of  religion,  inaccessible  to  historical 
investigation,  is  therefore  to  be  approached  by  a 
psychological  inquiry.  Our  question  is,  how  did 
men  ever  come  to  create  religion  at  all,  and  why  has 
it  persisted,  in  ever-changing  forms,  through  all  the 
stages  of  civilization? 

If  we  seek  a  motive,  universal,  supreme,  perpetual, 


4  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


it  will  be  found  in  the  impulse  to  self-preservation.* 
Spinoza  rightly  says  that  the  conatus  sese  conser- 
vandi  is  the  mainspring  and  directing  principle  of 
all  human  action.  Man  has  it  in  common  with  all 
other  animals,  in  which  it  is  enregistered  in  innumer¬ 
able  appropriate  instincts.  Below  the  instinctive 
level  it  is  manifest  in  protective  coloration  and  other 
forms  of  mimicry.  Higher  up  in  the  scale  the  in¬ 
stinct  is  accompanied  by  a  progressive  measure  of 
conscious  intelligence.  Throughout  it  is  the  con¬ 
dition  of  existence  for  the  individual  and  the  species. 

Its  elementary  manifestations  are  directed  to 
escaping  or  combating  the  enemies  of  life  and  well¬ 
being,  and  satisfying  organic  needs  such  as  hunger 
and  sexual  appetite;  but  well-being  soon  comes  to  in¬ 
clude  artificial  needs,  and  the  same  impulse  prompts 
to  the  gratification  of  these.  The  individual  is  not, 
however,  exclusively  interested  in  himself,  because 
he  does  not  and  cannot  exist  by  himself;  his  self- 
preservation  is  often  involved  in  the  preservation 
of  the  group  of  which  he  is  a  member.  This  is  very 
plain  in  the  case  of  the  gregarious  animals.  In  a 
herd  of  wild  horses  or  cattle,  for  example,  when 
threatened  by  their  natural  enemies  such  as  wolves, 
the  adult  males  of  the  herd  surround,  for  protection, 

*  I  call  it  impulse,  rather  than  instinct,  to  emphasize  its 
comprehensive  and  active  character. 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


5 


the  females  and  the  young,  and  expose  themselves 
to  danger  and  death  in  defense  of  the  weaker.  This 
is  the  condition  of  the  survival  of  the  herd,  and 
therefore  of  all  its  individual  members — the  con¬ 
dition  ultimately  of  the  perpetuity  of  the  species. 

The  same  thing  is  true  of  savages.  The  defense  of 
the  weaker  members  of  the  group  by  the  stronger, 
even  at  the  sacrifice  of  their  own  lives,  is  of  course 
not  the  result  of  reflection  on  what  would  happen  if 
they  should  flee  from  the  danger  instead  of  con¬ 
fronting  it,  but  upon  an  inherited  animal  instinct. 
This  impulse,  which  is  at  first  an  automatic  reaction, 
is  in  the  progress  of  society  fortified  by  social  motives 
the  antecedents  of  which  may  also  be  found  among 
animals.  “None  but  the  brave  deserve  the  fair” 
is  an  axiom  which  plays  no  inconsiderable  part  in 
the  mating  of  many  species,  and  is  more  consciously 
operative  in  the  sexual  selection  of  humankind. 
Both  in  man  and  beast  it  has  been  a  potent  factor 
in  the  improvement  of  the  stock. 

Nor  is  this  group  interest  manifested  solely  in  the 
reaction  to  danger.  It  shows  itself  in  animals  as 
well  as  in  men  in  the  ceding  or  acquisition  of  food 
by  the  more  capable  members  of  the  group  for  the 
benefit  of  the  less  capable  or  of  the  whole  commu¬ 
nity,  as  is  conspicuously  exemplified  by  bees  and 
other  insects.  The  co-operative  aspect  of  the  im- 


6  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


pulse  to  self-preservation  is  in  man  as  old,  as  instinc¬ 
tive,  and  as  imperative,  as  its  individual  aspect. 

With  the  growth  of  man’s  knowledge  of  himself 
and  of  the  world  he  lives  in,  self-preservation  comes 
to  mean  much  more  than  this.  There  are  things 
in  life  that  are  of  greater  worth  in  his  estimation 
than  life  itself;  things  that  alone  make  life  worth 
living,  in  comparison  with  which  all  lower  interests, 
including  life,  may  appear  worthless.  And  above 
all  worthful  things  is  the  worth  of  self  to  self — of 
self  in  the  highest  conception  of  it.  Man  comes  to 
realize  that  this  is  not  something  given,  a  native 
endowment  which  is  merely  to  be  conserved,  but 
that  all  that  is  of  supreme  value  is  to  be  achieved 
through  the  realization  of  what  in  nature  is  only 
potential.  For  the  negative,  self-preservation,  we 
must  then  put  its  positive  complement,  self-reali¬ 
zation,  the  becoming  and  achieving  of  all  that  it  is 
in  human  nature  to  be.  With  this  understanding 
of  its  implications  and  unfoldings  we  may  say  that 
self-preservation  is  the  universal  motive  in  religion. 

This  corresponds  to  the  experience  of  religious- 
minded  men  and  women.  An  American  psycholo¬ 
gist  a  few  years  ago  addressed  questions  to  a  con¬ 
siderable  number  of  educated  people  inquiring  what 
it  was  that  they  sought  and  found  in  religion,  and 
the  substance  of  the  answers  in  great  variety  of 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


7 


expression  may  be  summed  up  in  the  one  desire  and 
aspiration,  “Life,  more  life,  a  fuller,  richer,  more 
satisfying  life.” 

The  impulse  of  self-preservation  in  itself  has 
nothing  religious  about  it;  it  is  in  its  lower  ranges 
purely  biological.  And  if  man  were  placed  in  a 
world  where  he  was  exposed  to  no  strange  perils 
and  was  unfailingly  able  to  satisfy  all  his  needs  and 
desires,  he  would  find  no  occasion  for  religion.  The 
actual  world  in  which  the  savage  lives  is,  however, 
very  different;  he  is  not  secure  and  he  is  not  self- 
sufficient.  He  is  beset  by  perils  which  menace  his 
well-being  and  his  very  existence,  and  his  efforts 
to  satisfy  his  urgent  needs  are  often  frustrated. 
These  experiences  may  be  summarized  by  saying 
that  something  goes  wTong  with  him  in  a  way  he 
does  not  understand.  Thus  he  learns  his  depen¬ 
dence,  or,  as  I  should  prefer  to  express  it,  his  insuffi¬ 
ciency.  Let  us  try  to  imagine  his  experience  and 
what  it  means  to  him. 

Take  first  what  we  call  accidents.  A  man  is  cross¬ 
ing  a  stream  and  is  swept  off  his  feet  by  the  swollen 
waters;  a  bough  comes  crashing  down  from  a  tree 
he  is  passing  under  as  if  aimed  at  him;  or  a  rock 
hurtles  down  the  mountainside  directly  in  his  path; 
a  bolt  of  lightning  strikes  a  near-by  tree  and  perhaps 
kills  a  companion  at  his  side;  a  tornado,  like  some 


8  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


furious  monster,  uproots  the  forest  and  destroys 
the  rude  habitations  of  men. 

The  spontaneous  apprehension  of  such  an  experi¬ 
ence  cannot  be  better  illustrated  than  by  a  passage 
in  a  letter  of  William  James’s  written  four  days  after 
the  California  earthquake  of  1906,  describing  his 
feelings  during  those  eventful  minutes: 

“  Well,  when  I  lay  in  bed  at  about  half-past  five  that 
morning,  wide-awake,  and  the  room  began  to  sway, 
my  first  thought  was,  ‘Here’s  Bakewell’s  earthquake, 
after  all’;  and  when  it  went  crescendo  and  reached 
fortissimo  in  less  than  half  a  minute,  and  the  room 
was  shaken  like  a  rat  by  a  terrier,  with  the  most  vi¬ 
cious  expression  you  can  possibly  imagine,  it  was  to  my 
mind  absolutely  an  entity  that  had  been  waiting  all 
this  time  holding  back  its  activity,  but  at  last  saying, 
‘  Now,  go  it !  *  and  it  was  impossible  not  to  conceive  it 
as  animated  by  a  will,  so  vicious  was  the  temper  dis¬ 
played — everything  down ,  in  the  room,  that  could  go 
down,  bureaus,  etc.,  etc.,  and  the  shaking  so  rapid 
and  vehement.”* 

Then  there  is  the  experience  of  disease.  In  the 
midst  of  health  a  man  is  suddenly  attacked — as 
we  also  say — by  an  illness;  he  suffers  acute  pain 
without  visible  or  intelligible  cause,  he  alternately 
shivers  with  cold  and  burns  with  fever.  He  ob¬ 
serves  the  same  thing  in  others,  often  terminating 
*Letters  of  William  James,  vol.  II,  p.  248. 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


9 


in  death.  Thus  in  a  thousand  ways  he  is  made 
aware  that  besides  his  fellow  men,  friends  or  enemies, 
besides  the  animals  which  he  pursues  or  which  pur¬ 
sue  him,  in  short,  besides  the  things  he  is  familiar 
with  and  more  or  less  understands,  there  are  around 
him  other  things  that  are  outside  his  understanding 
as  they  are  beyond  his  foresight  or  control.  These 
somethings  are  active:  it  is  in  act  that  man  knows 
them.  For  this  reason  we  may  call  them  “  powers,” 
using  that  word  in  the  vaguest  possible  sense  and 
without  implying  anything  about  their  nature; 
they  are  just  the  “  somethings”  that  do  something 
to  him.  Naturally  the  savage’s  attention,  like  that 
of  the  rest  of  us,  is  chiefly  attracted  by  unfavorable 
occurrences,  by  the  harmful  things  that  the  powers 
do;  when  everything  goes  to  his  satisfaction  he 
does  not  think  about  it  at  all — why  should  he? 

Of  these  powers  man  is  immediately  aware  in 
the  acts  of  which  he  has  experience.  It  is  perhaps 
not  superfluous  to  say  that  he  does  not  come  to  a 
recognition  of  the  powers  by  reasoning  from  effect 
to  cause.  The  category  of  cause  and  effect  does 
not  exist  in  primitive  psychology,  in  which  the  two 
are  as  yet  temporally  and  logically  simultaneous, 
and  hence  he  cannot  be  led  into  inquiry  concerning 
the  causes  of  what  befalls  him.  Equally  foreign 
to  his  thinking  is  what  we  call  “  accident.”  Nothing 


10  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


merely  “happens”;  it  is  done  by  somebody  or  some¬ 
thing. 

In  his  notion  about  the  powers  there  is  one  other 
immediate  element,  namely,  that  when  something 
does  something  to  him  it  means  to  do  it.  This 
again  is  not  a  result  of  even  the  most  rudimentary 
reasoning.  He  just  knowTs  that  whatever  does  any¬ 
thing  does  it  because  it  wants  to,  like  himself  and 
other  men,  and  like  the  animals,  which  obviously 
act  in  the  same  way. 

Psychologists  call  this  the  “personifying  apper¬ 
ception,”  and  define  it  in  technical  language  which 
I  need  not  repeat  here.  In  short  and  simple  it  means 
that  man  as  the  subject  of  experience  projects  him¬ 
self  and  the  emotions  which  the  experience  arouses 
into  the  object  of  experience.  In  this  sense  and 
limitation  it  may  be  said  that  man  from  the  be¬ 
ginning  necessarily  assumes  the  personality  of  the 
powers  with  which  he  is  concerned,  but  we  must 
not  enrich  his  notion  of  personality  from  our  own; 
it  means,  let  me  repeat,  that  things  do  things  be¬ 
cause  they  want  to. 

The  phenomenon  is  misinterpreted  when  it  is 
said  that  primitive  man  believes  that  all  objects 
are  alive.  The  savage,  if  he  thinks  about  it  at  all, 
probably  attributes  life  to  all  objects  that  seem  to 
move  of  themselves,  as,  for  that  matter,  the  fathers 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


11 


of  philosophy  did  long  after.  In  generalizations 
about  the  universality  of  life  the  savage  has  no 
interest  whatever.  The  modern  child  who  kicks 
or  beats  a  stool  over  which  he  has  stumbled  does 
not  do  it  because  he  confuses  animate  and  inani¬ 
mate  objects;  his  instinctive  and  unreflecting  re¬ 
action  is  that  it  meant  to  hurt  him,  and  he  retaliates 
its  attack  upon  him  in  a  way  from  which  we  draw 
the  erroneous  inference  that  he  imagines  it  to  be 
alive.  When  a  man  trips  on  a  rocking-chair  in  the 
dark  and  damns  it,  it  is  not  because  he  attributes 
to  it  an  immortal  soul  which  he  consigns  to  eternal 
perdition;  it  is  what  he  vmuld  say  to  a  man  who  on 
purpose  had  put  out  his  foot  to  break  his  shins  or 
give  him  a  fall.  He  knows  a  great  deal  better  when 
he  thinks ;  but  the  point  is  exactly  that  under  the 
circumstances  he  reverts  to  the  conduct  of  his  un¬ 
thinking  ancestor.  All  that  can  rightly  be  said  is 
that  there  is  no  object  in  the  savage’s  world  that 
is  by  nature  incapable  of  doing  things,  and  that 
whatever  does  anything  means  to  do  it. 

Attention  has  recently  been  directed  to  the  fact 
that  peoples  in  widely  separated  parts  of  the  world 
attribute  every  kind  of  success  a  man  may  have  in 
his  enterprises,  and  every  power  or  excellence  he  may 
have,  to  his  possession  in  superior  measure  of  an  oc¬ 
cult  force  which  accomplishes  everything  that  seems 


12  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


to  transcend  the  ordinary  power  of  men  or  the  usual 
course  of  nature.  Anthropologists  commonly  call 
this  force  mana,  the  name  under  which  Codrington 
described  it  in  his  Melanesians.  Similar  beliefs  have 
been  noted  elsewhere,  especially  among  some  Ameri¬ 
can  Indians,  and  in  Madagascar,  and  the  effort  has 
been  made  to  extract  from  them  collectively  the 
“scientific”  meaning  of  mana — whatever  that  may 
mean — and  to  base  upon  it  far-reaching  theories  of 
magic  and  religion.  The  Melanesian  mana,  ac¬ 
cording  to  Codrington,  is  impersonal,  and  may  be 
lodged  in  inanimate  objects  as  well  as  in  animals  or 
human  beings.  It  is  believed  to  originate  with  per¬ 
sonal  beings,  and  is  possessed  and  imparted  “by 
disembodied  souls  or  supernatural  beings.”  Prac¬ 
tical  religion  consists  in  getting  possession  of  this 
force  for  oneself  and  using  it  for  one’s  own  ad¬ 
vantage;  to  this  end  offerings  and  prayers  are  di¬ 
rected.  It  is  morally  indifferent  and  can  be  em¬ 
ployed  for  the  malevolent  purposes  of  the  black 
art. 

The  adherents  of  the  preanimistic  hypothesis  are, 
I  think,  quite  right  in  their  contention  that  animism 
is  not,  as  Tylor  and  his  followers  supposed,  a  primi¬ 
tive  phenomenon,  but  the  product  of  a  somewhat 
advanced  stage  of  savage  psychology.  But  whether 
the  general  notion  of  an  occult  force  that  has  all 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


13 


kinds  of  efficacy  is  primitive  is  another  question. 
However  vague  man’s  notions  about  the  powers  may 
be,  and  however  little  of  distinct  individuality  he 
may  attribute  to  them,  the  experience  through 
which  he  becomes  aware  of  them  at  all  is  always  of 
a  particular  act  at  a  particular  time  and  place  and 
of  a  particular  character,  and  it  may  reasonably  be 
assumed  that  this  particularity  transfers  itself  in 
his  mind  to  a  particular  it  that  did  it.  It  may 
further  be  observed  that  the  peoples  from  whom 
such  notions  have  been  reported  are  far  from  being 
on  the  lowest  plane  of  culture,  but  are,  on  the  con¬ 
trary,  well  advanced  in  the  animistic  stage. 

Man’s  reaction  to  the  attacks  of  the  powers  is 
the  same  as  to  those  of  tangible  foes.  The  fact 
that  he  is  attacked  arouses  not  only  apprehension 
for  his  safety  but  the  instinctive  pugnacity  with 
which  nature  has  physiologically  equipped  him  for 
such  emergencies,  all  the  more  when  the  competing 
instinct  of  flight  promises  nothing.  What  he  does, 
also,  is  what  he  does  in  like  case  to  repel  enemies 
of  flesh  and  blood.  We  can,  indeed,  observe  these 
actions  only  among  existing  peoples  who  have  long 
since  come  to  imagine  such  powers  as  spirits;  but 
in  many  cases  this  conception  of  the  nature  of  the 
powers  has  not  affected  the  things  men  do  about  it. 
In  some  parts  of  the  world,  for  example,  a  threatening 


14  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


storm  is  actually  fought  with  weapons  and  all  the 
gestures  and  uproar  of  battle;  and  doubtless  the 
forefathers  did  just  so  before  they  had  any  notion 
of  a  demon  of  the  storm  which  they  were  putting 
to  rout.  Similarly  the  means  employed  in  China  to 
fight  off  an  eclipse  of  the  sun  are  in  all  probability  far 
older  than  the  mythical  explanation  of  the  eclipse 
as  the  attempt  of  a  dragon  to  devour  the  sun.  The 
same  assumption  may  be  made  of  many  of  the 
things  men  do  when  the  rain  upon  which  their  well¬ 
being  depends  seems  to  be  held  up.  Thus  in  a  vil¬ 
lage  in  Livonia,  almost  in  our  own  time,  three  men 
climbed  a  fir-tree;  one  made  thunder  by  pounding 
a  cask,  one  struck  two  firebrands  together  and  made 
lightning  of  the  sparks,  and  the  third,  with  a  bunch 
of  twigs  sprinkled  water  from  a  vessel  all  around, 
thus  making  rain.  Much  in  fact  of  what  is  inex¬ 
actly  called  mimetic  magic  is  a  survival  of  this 
primitive  stage  in  which  men  really  worked  nature 
themselves,  or  started  it  working,  with  no  second 
thought  about  spirits  or  gods. 

If  the  things  thus  instinctively  done  were  effective, 
as  they  often  seemed  to  be,  they  would  be  repeated 
on  like  occasions  more  consciously  and  with  in¬ 
creasing  confidence,  and  the  method  would  be 
handed  on  from  one  generation  to  another.  The 
successful  procedures  which  in  animals  in  long 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


15 


course  of  time  become  organically  registered  in  in¬ 
stincts,  among  men  are  preserved  in  conscious  recol¬ 
lection  and  are  fixed  in  custom. 

An  important  condition  of  all  this  was  that  the 
powers  with  which  man  had  to  deal  were  not  remote. 
It  was  only  as  present  in  the  act  and  moment  that 
man  was  aware  of  them  or  had  any  concern  about 
them;  and  man  could  act  upon  them  as  immediately 
as  they  upon  him.  They  were  not  supernatural. 
To  men  who  have  no  idea  of  the  regularity  of  nature, 
of  forces  and  laws,  or  even  of  causality,  nothing  is 
natural  in  our  sense,  and  consequently  nothing  su¬ 
pernatural.  They  know  only  the  ordinary  and  the 
extraordinary  in  various  degrees,  with  a  suggestion 
of  the  occult.  The  powers  are,  in  fact,  the  only 
activities  of  the  nature  they  know.  Nor  are  their 
doings  either  incomprehensible  or  irresistible:  when 
they  attack  man  he  combats  them  and  often  proves 
himself  a  match  for  them;  when  they  will  not  work 
he  makes  them.  That  men,  or  at  least  some  men, 
can  control  the  powers  and  use  them  for  beneficent 
or  malevolent  ends  is  a  universal  belief,  the  common 
postulate  of  magic  and  religion. 

We  have  thus  far  talked  about  religion  without 
defining  it.  Before  we  go  farther  it  will  be  well  to 
agree  upon  what  we  shall  henceforth  understand  by 
the  term.  Of  formal  definitions  of  religion  there  is 


16  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


no  lack,  but  I  doubt  if  we  should  be  any  the  wiser 
for  enumerating  and  discussing  them  here.  What 
many  of  them  give  is  the  idea  of  religion  as  con¬ 
ceived  in  the  author’s  philosophy,  often  in  sublime 
disregard  of  concrete  realities;  others,  trying  to  find 
a  generic  description  applicable  to  all  religions, 
offer  something  like  a  circle  whose  circumference 
is  everywhere  and  its  centre  nowhere.  The  fact 
that  religion  is  so  complex  and  so  infinitely  diverse 
that  it  cannot  be  formally  defined  does  not,  how¬ 
ever,  prevent  us  from  recognizing  it  wherever  it  is 
found,  and  instead  of  attempting  to  define  it,  we 
may  more  profitably  ask  what  are  the  marks  by 
which  it  is  recognized. 

In  our  hypothetical  analysis,  we  have  supposed 
our  primitive  religious  subject  to  be  aware  in  his 
experience  of  something  that  does  something  to  him ; 
like  himself  these  somethings  mean  to  do  what  they 
do;  and,  prompted  by  the  instinct  of  self-preser¬ 
vation,  he,  on  his  part  does  something  to  defend 
himself  or  to  make  them  do  what  he  wants.  For 
these  somethings  we  have  used  the  vague  word 
“  powers,”  meaning  only  things  that  do  things,  and 
presuming  nothing  about  their  nature.  If  now  we 
survey  the  phenomena  of  religions  that  are  acces¬ 
sible  to  our  observation,  we  shall  find  these  cor¬ 
responding  marks. 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


17 


1.  Man  believes  that  there  are  powers,  however 
conceived,  upon  whose  behavior  toward  him  his 
well-being  is  in  manifold  ways  dependent. 

2.  He  believes  that  these  powers  are  actuated  by 
motives  like  his  own,  and  therefore  comprehensible. 

3.  He  believes  that  it  is  possible  for  men,  in  some 
way  or  other,  to  work  upon  the  powers  so  as  to 
keep  them  from  doing  harm  or  make  them  serve 
him. 

4.  And,  finally,  he  acts  on  this  belief. 

That  men  thus  act  is  an  essential  part  of  these 
marks  of  religion.  Beliefs  about  the  powers  them¬ 
selves  do  not  constitute  religion;  they  are  concom¬ 
itants  of  those  human  activities  in  which  religion  as 
a  practical  concern  of  man  consists,  in  distinction 
from  the  disinterested  endeavor  to  understand  and 
explain  the  world  and  its  working  which  is  char¬ 
acteristic  of  philosophy  and  science.  There  is  no 
religion  where  man  does  not  do  something  about  it, 
even  if  that  something  be,  as  in  some  of  the  more 
advanced  Oriental  religions,  the  most  concentrated 
doing  nothing. 

What  man  does,  and  what  gives  its  character  to 
his  religion,  is  determined  by  two  factors:  What  he 
wants  of  the  powers,  and  what  he  thinks  about  them; 
and  what  he  thinks  about  them  is,  in  religion,  chiefly 
determined  by  what  he  wants  of  them.  So  long  as 


18  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


man  feels  no  needs  that  could  not  be  satisfied  by  an 
abundance  of  material  good  things  and  his  animal 
ability  to  enjoy  them — life,  health,  wealth,  power, 
and  pleasure — his  gods  will  be  purveyors  of  such 
things  in  this  world  or  a  continuation  of  it;  and 
his  practical  religion  will  be  appropriate  means  to 
get  plenty  of  them  from  the  powers  which  dispense 
them.  The  larger  his  wants,  the  greater  the  gods 
become  from  whom  he  seeks  the  satisfaction  of 
them. 

When,  by  a  radical  transvaluation  of  values,  men 
come  to  regard  these  natural  goods  as  worthless  in 
comparison  with  the  worth  of  a  transcendental  self, 
they  seek  in  religion  the  realization  of  all  the  poten¬ 
tialities  of  this  self,  and  conceive  a  metaphysical 
Overself,  oneness  or  sameness  with  which  is  the  goal 
of  the  finite  self,  its  perfection  and  its  eternal  bliss. 
In  this  sole  Reality,  now  become  the  end  of  man’s 
desire  and  not  a  means  to  its  attainment,  the  mani¬ 
fold  powers  of  his  earlier  notions  are  merged  in  the 
Absolute  One.  From  one  extreme  to  the  other 
there  is  a  correlation  between  what  man  wants  and 
what  he  thinks  about  the  beings  or  Being  of — or  in — 
which  he  seeks  the  satisfaction  of  his  wants.  The 
relation  is  reciprocal,  but  in  religion,  I  repeat,  the 
precedence  is  on  the  side  of  man’s  wants.  This  is 
the  path  along  which  religion  advances  from  stage 


ANTECEDENTS  AND  RUDIMENTS 


19 


to  stage  in  the  progress  of  civilization,  of  which,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  is  one  of  the  most  potent  factors. 

In  this  advance  the  elementary  notions  about  the 
powers  which  we  have  taken  as  marks  of  religion 
undergo  great  changes,  and  corresponding  changes 
follow  in  the  things  men  do  to  get  what  they  want. 
The  tenacity  of  custom  however — nowhere  greater 
than  in  this  sphere — makes  it  easier  to  adopt  new 
means  of  influencing  the  powers  than  to  drop  old 
ones,  so  that  highly  evolved  rituals  are  often  an 
incongruous  conglomerate  in  which  all  previous 
stages  are  sacredly  perpetuated. 

Against  the  universality  of  our  four  marks  it 
may  perhaps  be  objected  that  primitive  Buddhism, 
and  some  other  contemporary  and  cognate  Indian 
religions,  acknowledge  no  power  whose  aid  man  can 
enlist  to  deliver  him  from  the  endless  round  of  re¬ 
birth  under  the  inexorable  law  of  the  deed  and  its 
fruit;  he  alone  can  be  his  own  deliverer  and  by  his 
own  effort  attain  release  in  Nirvana.  The  answer 
is  that  they  lodge  in  man  the  power  to  emancipate 
himself  from  the  bondage  of  empirical  humanity  and 
the  cycle  of  mundane  existences.  In  this  respect 
primitive  Buddhism  is  in  accord  with  the  great 
philosophical  salvations  of  India  before  and  after 
it,  monist  or  dualist.  In  time,  however,  and  with 
its  spread  in  many  lands,  it  became  the  religion  of 


20  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


multitudes  who  brought  over  into  the  religion  they 
adopted  all  they  thought  worth  keeping  of  their 
earlier  religion — gods  (renamed),  demons,  rites,  and 
observances — and  did  not  fail  to  acquire  in  diverse 
ways  the  outward  marks  of  religion  in  the  recog¬ 
nition  of  multitudinous  powers  to  whom  men  turned 
not  only  for  protection  against  evils  and  for  help 
in  bodily  needs,  but  for  enlightenment.  Its  Bod- 
hisattvas  became  in  effect  gracious  gods,  and  even¬ 
tually,  in  the  Pure  Land  sects,  authors  of  salvation, 
a  development  closely  parallel  to  that  of  Hinduism 
and  probably  not  independent  of  it;  while  what  may 
perhaps  not  inappropriately  be  called  the  agnostic 
philosophy  of  Buddha  was  superseded  in  a  great 
part  of  the  Buddhist  world  by  imposing  metaphysi¬ 
cal  and  psychological  systems,  and  the  salvation 
of  the  individual  saint  by  the  aspiration  to  be  a 
savior  to  all  beings. 

Our  next  task  will  be  to  show  what  men  first 
imagined  the  powers  to  be  like,  and  what  they  did 
in  consequence  of  those  notions. 


CHAPTER  II 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 

The  innumerable  powers  with  which  man  has  to 
do  are  differentiated  in  the  first  instance  by  the 
spheres  or  localities  in  which  they  are  active;  for 
example,  in  forest,  stream,  or  spring;  in  the  sky, 
in  cloud  and  storm,  or  upon  the  mountains  which 
gather  and  seem  to  make  the  storm.  Or  they  are 
distinguished  by  the  things  they  do,  as  when  a  man 
is  attacked  by  fever,  headache,  or  wasting  sickness. 
The  latter  class  exist  only  in  the  mischief  they  do, 
so  that  they  seem  always  to  be  hostile  to  men;  while 
the  powers  which  are  operative  in  external  nature, 
though  capricious,  incalculable,  and  often  violently 
angry,  are  not  constantly  unfriendly;  most  of  the 
time  they  are  indifferent,  and  so  far  as  they  serve 
men’s  needs  may  come  to  be  thought  of  as  friendly 
and  helpful  powers.  A  fixed  division  of  the  powers 
into  good  and  bad,  however,  even  in  the  sense  of 
friendly  or  hostile,  is  only  made  at  a  much  later 
stage. 

Such  vague  notions  of  powers  that  do  what  they 
do  with  meaning  and  purpose,  and  are  only  in  this 

sense  personal,  have  seldom,  if  ever,  survived  into 

21 


22  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


the  field  of  our  observation.  Very  early  and  almost 
universally  men  began  to  imagine  more  distinctly 
what  the  powers  are  like,  and  therewith  religion 
passed  into  a  stage  with  which  we  are  abundantly 
acquainted  in  all  parts  of  the  world  and  all  periods 
of  history.  In  this  stage  the  powers  are  imagined 
as  spirits,  that  is,  ordinarily  invisible  and  intangible 
but  substantial  and  energetic  beings,  which  may  be 
lodged  in  particular  objects,  as,  for  example,  in  a 
tree,  a  rock,  a  mountain,  a  river,  or  the  sun,  moon, 
and  stars,  or  again  in  a  man;  or  may  wander  about 
freely  without  such  abiding  localization,  or  at  least 
without  any  that  men  discover. 

The  way  in  wdiich  such  notions  arise  has  often 
been  analyzed.  They  are  the  product  of  the  man’s 
first  adventures  in  psychology.  It  is  his  own  nature 
as  he  thus  discovers  it  which  he  naively  projects 
into  external  nature.  Of  the  experiences  which 
give  him  the  idea  of  soul  the  most  important  are, 
first,  the  observation  of  death,  and,  second,  dreams, 
waking  visions,  and  abnormal  psychical  phenomena. 
To  begin  with  the  former,  a  man  who  yesterday 
was  in  full  vigor,  to-day  lies  cold,  speechless,  and 
motionless  upon  the  ground.  It  plain  that  some¬ 
thing  is  missing.  Something  has  gone  out  of  him — 
the  very  thing  that  made  him  a  living  man;  his 
life  has  left  him.  Men  have  actually  seen  or  heard 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


23 


it  go  out  with  the  last  breath,  or  in  the  blood  stream¬ 
ing  from  a  mortal  wound.  That  such  is  the  origin 
of  the  notion  of  soul  often  appears  in  the  very  name, 
which  in  many  widely  remote  languages  is  the  word 
for  “breath,”  and  in  the  common  belief  that  the 
soul  is  the  blood  or  has  its  seat  in  the  blood. 

The  soul,  then,  w’as  the  power  that  breathed  and 
pulsed  and  moved  in  man,  that  thought  and  spoke 
and  loved  and  hated.  It  had  gone  out;  but  whither¬ 
soever  it  had  gone  it  was  still  the  life  it  was.  That 
it  ceased  to  exist  is  unimaginable,  which  is  the  same 
as  saying  that  to  the  savage  it  is  unthinkable.  Ex¬ 
tinction  is  in  fact  an  enormous  abstraction.  Our 
science  may  teach  us  to  conceive  of  life  as  a  delicate 
balance  of  biochemical  functions  which  come  to  an 
end  when  the  balance  is  upset;  but  so  long  as  soul 
is  conceived  in  any  sense  as  an  entity  distinct  from 
the  bodv,  and  as  in  fact  what  thinks  and  feels  and 
wills,  and  moves  the  body,  there  is  no  reason  why  it 
should  die  with  the  body. 

What  manner  of  thing  the  soul  is,  men  learned 
chiefly  from  dreams.  In  a  dream  a  man  sees  and 
holds  friendly  or  hostile  converse  with  living  men 
whom,  when  he  awakes,  he  knows  to  be  far  away. 
His  soul  must  have  temporarily  left  his  body  where 
it  was  lying  and  instantaneously  transported  itself 
to  a  distant  place.  Such  temporary  absence  of  the 


24  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


soul  is  recognized  also  in  fainting  or  other  forms  of 
unconsciousness.  At  other  times  men  from  remote 
places  appear  to  him  in  his  own  habitat.  He  recog¬ 
nizes  them,  talks  with  them,  maybe  quarrels  with 
them  or  fights  with  them.  Their  souls  have  left 
the  bodies  far  away  and  come  to  visit  him.  He 
has  similar  dreams  about  animals;  he  hunts  them, 
successfully  or  unsuccessfully,  or  he  is  attacked  by 
wild  beasts;  that  is,  by  their  souls. 

The  objects  which  appear  to  him  in  his  dreams 
are  in  form  and  act  exactly  like  their  corporeal 
selves.  These  dream  experiences,  we  must  remem¬ 
ber,  are  as  real  as  any  in  man’s  waking  life;  they 
are  experiences  of  sense,  and  man  no  more  doubts 
them  than  he  does  the  evidences  of  his  waking 
senses.  From  them  he  gets  the  notion  that  the 
soul  of  man  or  beast  is  a  double  of  the  body,  visible 
in  dreams  and  in  waking  visions,  though  ordinarily 
it  cannot  be  seen.  It  is  generally  impalpable  also — 
when  Odysseus  tried  to  embrace  the  shade  of  his 
mother  she  flitted  from  his  arms  like  a  shadow  or 
a  dream.  If  man  should  ask  himself  what  stuff 
souls  are  made  of,  the  thing  that  naturally  suggests 
itself  is  something  like  the  atmosphere;  and  this, 
in  fact,  is  the  common  notion  of  the  soul,  it  is  spirit 
(that  is,  breath  or  wind),  a  highly  attenuated  form 
of  matter  like  air  or  vapor. 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


25 


It  is  not  living  men  only  who  thus  in  the  real 
experience  of  dreams  are  seen,  temporarily  detached 
from  their  bodies;  dead  men  also  appear  in  the 
perfect  semblance  of  their  living  selves,  and  they 
behave  just  as  they  did  in  life.  Here  again  man 
has  the  indubitable  evidence  of  his  senses  that  the 
souls  which  have  been  separated  from  their  bodies 
in  death  continue  to  exist,  and  to  be,  except  for 
solidity,  just  such  as  they  wxere  before.  Indeed,  in 
nightmares  he  sometimes  finds  that  they  are  not 
lacking  in  solidity;  they  are  capable  of  what  modern 
mediums  call  “  materialization,”  and  grapple  with  a 
man  and  strangle  him  with  superhuman  strength. 
Of  such  elements  the  notions  of  souls  are  formed, 
a  social  composite  of  many  individual  experiences 
told  by  each  to  others,  and  making  a  traditional 
ghost  lore. 

However  men  may  imagine  the  physical  constitu¬ 
tion  of  souls  and  their  manifestations,  the  far  more 
important  thing  is  that  the  soul  is  conceived  as  the 
real  identical  self  of  a  man,  and  from  being  so  after 
death  it  comes  to  be  so  in  life. 

Of  the  reality  of  surviving  souls,  man  can  have 
no  doubt,  nor  has  he  any  question  that  he  knows 
what  they  are  like.  The  conditions  of  their  exist¬ 
ence  he  cannot  imagine  otherwise  than  after  the 
likeness  of  their  bodily  existence.  The  soul  as  a 


26  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


double  of  the  body  is  not  easily  dissociated  in 
imagination  from  the  body;  it  is  consequently  be¬ 
lieved  to  linger  about  the  place  where  the  body  lies; 
in  uncanny  hours  it  is  often  seen  there.  Frequently 
its  existence,  or  at  least  its  well-being,  is  believed 
to  be  dependent  on  the  preservation  of  the  body, 
about  which  the  survivors  then  take  much  pains. 
The  souls  of  the  unburied  or  neglected  dead  are 
almost  universally  believed  to  have  a  worse  lot 
wherever  they  go. 

Souls  have  the  same  needs  as  living  men,  and 
hence  at  the  burial,  and  often  at  intervals  thereafter, 
food  and  drink  are  provided  for  them.  Weapons, 
tools  and  utensils,  domestic  furniture,  are  deposited 
in  the  tomb;  wives  and  slaves  are  buried  with  the 
great  of  this  world  to  accompany  and  serve  them 
in  the  ghostly  state.  But  though  thus  closely  as¬ 
sociated  with  the  body  after  death  as  in  life,  souls 
are  not  confined  to  the  body  or  to  the  tomb,  other¬ 
wise  men  would  not  see  them  elsewhere  in  dreams. 

Animals,  trees,  streams,  fountains,  clouds,  sun, 
moon,  and  stars — things  that  move  of  themselves 
and  consequently  seem  to  be  alive,  also  have  souls; 
as  in  living  man,  it  is  the  soul  in  them  which  lives 
and  acts.  It  is,  however,  an  erroneous  extension 
of  these  notions  about  souls  in  natural  objects  when 
it  is  said  that  the  savage  thinks  that  there  is  a 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


27 


soul  in  everything.  As  I  have  remarked  in  another 
connection,  the  savage  has  no  disposition  to  gener¬ 
alize  about  “everything”;  his  interest  is  confined 
to  the  particular  things  that  concern  him. 

Besides  the  spirits  which  are  thus  ordinarily  lodged 
in  bodies  of  one  kind  or  another,  and  which  we 
may  for  that  reason  call  souls,  there  are  many  which 
have  no  such  embodiment.  The  powers  of  whose 
doings  man  has  experience  in  the  ailments  which 
come  and  go  so  mysteriously  are  imagined  as  spirits, 
invisible  somethings  that  get  into  a  man  and  do 
him  harm,  just  as  others  attack  him  from  outside. 
It  is  not  impossible  that  the  conception  of  diseases 
as  invading  spirits  is  in  origin  independent  of  the 
idea  of  soul.  That  is,  however,  a  question  of  no 
importance  for  our  present  purpose. 

Between  souls  and  spirits  there  is  no  difference 
in  kind,  and  no  boundary.  The  souls  of  men  and 
beasts  furnish  no  inconsiderable  contingent  to  the 
hosts  of  spirits.  In  particular  it  is  believed  that 
the  souls  of  the  neglected  dead  become  malignant 
spirits,  and  avenge  their  dire  fate  upon  their  un- 
dutiful  kinsfolk  or  on  the  whole  community.  Men 
who  were  peculiarly  feared  in  their  lifetime  become 
still  more  terrible  after  death  as  evil  spirits.  On 
the  other  hand,  ancestral  spirits  are  peculiarly 
friendly  to  their  own  kin,  watching  over  and  pros- 


28  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


pering  them;  and  the  spirits  of  dead  chiefs  fre¬ 
quently  become  clan  gods,  or  clan  gods  are  believed 
to  have  been  ancient  chiefs. 

When  the  powers  come  to  be  thus  imagined  after 
the  likeness  of  souls  or  spirits,  the  origin  of  these 
notions  and  their  association  with  man’s  conception 
of  his  own  nature  lend  the  powers  an  increasingly 
human  character,  not  necessarily  in  bodily  shape, 
but  in  thought  and  feeling  and  will,  and  make  them 
more  completely  personal — the  beginning  of  that 
anthropomorphic  process  which  is  of  so  great  con¬ 
sequence  in  the  progress  of  religion.  The  local  and 
functional  powers  now  become  individual  personal 
spirits,  each  of  which  has  its  abode  in  a  certain  place 
or  object,  or  is  recognized  by  its  specific  activities. 

This  stage  in  the  evolution  of  religion  has  since 
Tylor  commonly  been  called  “animism,”  compre¬ 
hending  in  the  term  notions  about  both  souls  and 
spirits.  A  more  descriptive  word  for  the  phenomena, 
from  the  religious  point  of  view  in  distinction  from 
the  psychological,  would  be  “  demonism,”  if  we  could 
rid  ourselves  of  the  evil  connotation  of  “demon”  in 
modern  use,  and  take  it  in  the  neutral  sense  of  the 
Greek  daimon,  to  designate  spirits  good,  bad,  and 
indifferent.  This  terminology  would  have  the  ad¬ 
vantage  of  enabling  us  to  set  “polydemonism”  over 
against  the  next  superior  stage,  “polytheism.”  I 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


29 


shall,  however,  conform  to  current  usage  and  call 
this  the  animistic  stage  of  religion. 

The  conception  of  the  powers  as  spirits  has, 
further,  a  large  effect  upon  what  man  does  to  defend 
himself  against  them  or  to  make  them  serve  his  end. 
Two  means  of  making  the  spirits  subservient  to 
man’s  will  are  so  widely  distributed  that  it  is  hardly 
an  exaggeration  to  call  them  universal.  In  one  of 
them  a  spirit  is  conjured  into  a  human  being,  who 
then  knows  and  speaks  and  acts  as  the  organ  of  the 
spirit;  in  the  other,  a  spirit  is  introduced  into  some 
convenient  object  and  confined  there,  so  that  its 
energies  are  at  the  disposal  of  the  owner  of  the 
object.  These  two  varieties,  far  from  being  mutu¬ 
ally  exclusive,  generally  coexist,  though  one  or  the 
other  may  be  more  prominent  in  the  religion  of  a 
particular  people. 

The  first  type  may  be  defined  as  induced  posses¬ 
sion.  A  man  who  has  the  gift  or  the  art  of  getting 
himself  possessed  by  a  spirit  over  which  he  has  con¬ 
trol  is  called  in  the  books  a  Shaman,  a  name  which 
is  native  among  certain  peoples  in  Siberia.  Other 
peoples  have  various  names  for  such  a  man  in  their 
own  languages;  and  considerable  variety  exists  in 
the  methods  employed  in  different  parts  of  the 
world  to  bring  about  the  possession,  but  at  the  bot¬ 
tom  the  phenomenon  is  the  same. 


30  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


Its  origin  lies  doubtless  in  the  mental  and  nervous 
disorders  which  are  all  the  world  over  believed  to 
be  due  to  demon  possession.  In  a  fit  of  epilepsy, 
for  example,  everything  in  the  seizure  suggests  to 
the  spectator  invasion  by  an  invisible  power  which 
does  what  it  wills  with  the  subject  and  in  him. 
It  supplants  his  self-consciousness,  and  makes  his 
bodily  organs  instruments  of  the  intruder.  In  this 
state  his  gestures  and  actions  are  not  his.  In 
Siberia  the  Shaman  himself  is  frequently  an  epi¬ 
leptic  or  afflicted  with  some  milder  neurosis,  and 
the  practice  of  his  calling  aggravates  these  predis¬ 
positions,  which  are  further  reinforced  when,  as  is 
the  case  in  some  regions,  the  office  runs  in  families. 
Such  abnormality  is,  however,  by  no  means  uni¬ 
versal. 

Besides  native  or  acquired  susceptibility,  the 
Shaman  has  to  master  the  traditional  art  of  bring¬ 
ing  on  trance  states  and  managing  spirits,  which 
is  passed  on  by  elder  experts  to  their  successors. 
Every  Shaman  has  one  or  more  familiar  spirits 
which  he  can  get  into  him  and  avail  himself  of  their 
superior  knowledge  and  power.  He  can  thus  fore¬ 
tell  the  future,  find  out  what  is  going  on  in  distant 
places,  discover  secrets,  detect  thieves,  and  answer 
all  manner  of  questions  for  which  men  resort  to  a 
soothsayer  or  prophet.  By  virtue  of  his  ability  to 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


31 


learn  what  is  pleasing  to  spirits  or  gods  he  frequently 
gives  directions  about  worship  or  expiation,  assum¬ 
ing  the  functions  of  a  priest. 

Inasmuch  as  every  kind  of  ill-fortune  is  ascribed 
to  the  machinations  of  malevolent  spirits,  it  is  the 
business  of  the  Shaman  to  discover  what  spirit  is 
doing  the  mischief  and  to  drive  it  away.  Illness  is 
a  spirit  that  has  got  into  a  man  and  must  be  ex¬ 
pelled.  The  procedure  frequently  takes  the  form  of 
a  duel  between  the  Shaman,  or  rather  the  spirit  he 
has  conjured  into  himself,  and  the  spirit  that  has 
invaded  the  patient,  in  which  the  latter  is  vanquished 
and  takes  flight.  We  have  here  in  primitive  form 
one  of  the  most  widely  distributed  types  of  exorcism. 
The  expulsion  of  disease  demons  is  often  accom¬ 
panied  by  the  use  of  herbs  or  roots,  emetics  or  pur¬ 
gatives,  for  example;  of  fumigations  and  manipula¬ 
tions  which  may  in  fact  have  remedial  effects;  and 
as  these  become  established  concomitants  of  the 
exorcism,  the  Shaman  is  a  forerunner  of  the  physi¬ 
cian. 

One  wflio  has  such  powTer  over  spirits  as  to  expel 
them  from  the  bodies  of  their  victims  must  be  able, 
also,  to  send  them  into  people  and  make  them  ill  or 
mad — a  common  form  of  witchcraft.  The  Shaman 
thus  unites  in  himself  many  functions  which  in  the 
progress  of  civilization  become  differentiated,  and 


32  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


this  fact  is  an  additional  indication  of  the  great 
antiquity,  the  relative  primitiveness,  of  the  phenom¬ 
enon. 

Another  way  in  which  men  secure  control  of 
spirits  and  make  them  serviceable  to  their  purposes 
is  by  getting  them  into  some  object,  generally  port¬ 
able,  and  confining  them  in  it.  When  Portuguese 
sailors  and  traders  began  to  visit  the  west  coast  of 
Africa  they  found  the  natives  wearing  suspended 
about  them  small  shells  or  tips  of  horns  sealed  up, 
and  rightly  inferred  that  these  things  were  worn  for 
the  same  reason  that  they  themselves  wore  amulets — 
a  medallion,  for  example,  or  an  Agnus  Dei,  properly 
blessed — for  protection  or  good  luck.  Accordingly 
they  called  the  amulets  of  the  negroes  by  the  name 
they  used  for  their  own,  feitigo,  and  the  word  has 
passed  into  other  European  languages  as  fetiche , 
“fetish/’  etc. 

The  phenomenon  and  the  name  were  brought 
into  currency  by  the  President  de  Brosses  in  a  book 
which  otherwise  marks  an  epoch  in  the  study  of 
religions.*  De  Brosses  extended  the  use  of  the  term, 
however,  to  all  manner  of  objects  in  which  a  spirit 
was  believed  to  be  lodged,  including  under  it  the 

*Du  culte  des  dieux  fetiches ,  ou  parallele  de  Vandenne  re¬ 
ligion  de  VEgypte  avec  la  religion  aduelle  de  Nigritie.  1760. 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


33 


worship  of  sacred  animals  by  the  ancient  Egyptians. 
Later  writers  have  defined  fetishism  broadly  as  the 
worship  of  inanimate  objects,  and  some  have  ap¬ 
plied  the  name  even  to  the  worship  of  the  heavenly 
bodies.  In  such  an  extension  the  term  loses  all 
specific  meaning,  and  becomes,  as  it  does  for  the 
philosopher  Comte,  merely  a  name  for  the  lowest 
forms  of  heathenism,  with  a  disrespectful  connota¬ 
tion.  A  famous  Phi  Beta  Kappa  oration  at  Harvard 
will  be  remembered,  in  which  the  study  of  Greek 
was  described  as  “  A  College  Fetish,”  by  which  title 
the  author  meant  only  to  stigmatize  its  irrationality 
and  futility.  I  shall  confine  my  use  of  the  wmrd  to 
the  phenomena  which  it  was  first  employed  to  de¬ 
scribe. 

The  amulets  (fetishes)  of  the  negroes  may  be 
natural  objects  such  as  pebbles  with  peculiar  mark¬ 
ings,  the  possessors  of  which  are  believed  thereby 
to  be  protected  against  certain  dangers  or  to  be 
assured  of  success  in  certain  undertakings.  There 
can  be  little  doubt  that  the  use  of  such  objects  and 
the  belief  in  their  effectiveness  is  earlier  than  the 
animistic  notion  that  they  are  inhabited  by  a  spirit. 
Upon  the  latter  stage,  while  the  use  of  natural  fet¬ 
ishes  continues,  the  fetish  is  more  commonly  a  man¬ 
ufactured  article,  and  there  are  experts  who  know 
how  to  make  them  for  various  special  purposes. 


34  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


In  West  Africa  the  fetish  is  frequently  a  snail  shell 
or  the  tip  of  an  antelope’s  horn,  filled  with  a  mixture 
of  various  substances  compounded  secundum  artem. 
Some  of  the  ingredients  are  selected  on  principles 
of  what  is  called  sympathetic  magic,  as  when  a  claw 
or  some  hairs  of  a  leopard  are  put  in  an  amulet  to 
give  the  owner  courage,  or  part  of  a  dead  man’s 
brain  to  give  cunning,  or  an  eyeball,  preferably  of 
a  white  man,  to  give  preternatural  keenness  of  vision. 
The  reason  for  the  selection  frequently  escapes  our 
too  sophisticated  imagination.  Chicken  dung  is  a 
favorite  menstruum,  with  which  ashes  of  herbs  or 
bones,  gums,  and  many  other  things  are  combined 
for  each  kind  of  spirit  according  to  a  special  recipe. 

When  the  maker  has  thus  prepared  the  receptacle 
he  conjures  a  proper  spirit  into  it  and  seals  it  up 
with  pitch.  Inasmuch  as  the  fetishes  or  the  spirits 
that  are  lodged  in  them  are  generally  narrow  special¬ 
ists,  a  well-provided  man  will  have  a  large  collection 
of  them;  one  to  protect  him  against  this  ailment 
and  one  for  that;  one  to  ward  off  the  evil  eye;  one 
to  protect  him  from  wild  beasts  in  the  forest,  or  to 
give  him  success  in  the  chase;  another  to  make  him 
irresistible  in  love,  and  so  on,  indefinitely.  With  a 
less  commendable  motive  fetishes  are  made  also  to 
give  the  proprietor  power  over  some  one  else.  Into 
these  a  hair,  a  nail-paring,  spittle,  or — best  of  all — a 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


35 


drop  of  the  other’s  blood  is  put.  If  this  cannot  be 
done,  his  name  will  suffice. 

The  fetish  is  treated  with  respect,  since  the  spirit 
in  it  might  resent  being  otherwise  treated.  The 
owner  talks  to  it,  cajoles  it,  tells  it  what  he  wants 
and  expects  of  it.  If  it  does  not  work  he  upbraids 
it,  and  if  it  continues  to  disappoint  him  he  thrown 
it  away — unless  he  finds  a  profitable  opportunity  to 
dispose  of  it  to  a  European  collector  of  curios.  The 
fetish  maker’s  explanation  of  the  failure  is  frequently 
that  the  spirit  has  escaped  from  its  lodging,  or  that 
some  enemy  or  ill-wisher  has  procured  a  more  power¬ 
ful  fetish;  in  the  latter  case  he  may  offer,  for  a 
suitable  remuneration,  to  fabricate  one  more  power¬ 
ful  still. 

Besides  these  individual  and  specialized  fetishes 
there  are  others  which  belong  to  the  community  and 
are  believed  to  guard  the  common  interests  of  all. 
Such  a  fetish  may  be  hung  on  the  surrounding  stock¬ 
ade  to  keep  away  intruders,  human  or  demonic,  or 
housed  in  a  little  hut  where  the  path  enters  the 
village  enclosure.  It  is  not  only  told  what  the  in¬ 
habitants  want  of  it,  but  offerings  of  plantains  or 
fish  or  a  fowl  are  made  to  it — the  beginnings  of 
“cultus,”  that  is  to  say,  the  cultivation  of  a  spirit 
which  is  on  the  way  to  grow  into  a  tutelary 
demon. 


36  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


The  guardian  spirit  of  the  village  or  tribe  may 
be  a  small  oblong  stone  set  up  on  end  or  a  wooden 
post,  having  perhaps  a  fanciful  resemblance  to  a 
man.  A  little  assistance  from  human  hands,  mark¬ 
ing  the  rude  outline  of  eyes  and  nose  and  the  mouth 
in  colored  earth,  begins  to  transform  the  fetish  into 
what  we  call  an  idol.  Idolatry  in  the  proper  sense 
belongs,  however,  to  a  more  advanced  stage  in  the 
history  of  religion  than  that  with  which  we  are  now 
occupied. 

The  fetish  maker  must  be  a  man  who  has  control 
over  spirits,  and  since  this  kind  of  control  may  be 
exercised  through  his  own  familiar  spirit,  Shaman 
and  fetish  maker  often  come  together. 

Animals,  as  we  have  seen,  have  souls  which,  except 
for  their  shape,  are  in  savage  apprehension  alto¬ 
gether  like  those  of  men,  precisely  as  in  the  beast 
tales  of  folk-lore  or  the  inventions  of  modern  nature 
fiction.  Man  ascribes  to  them  his  own  feelings  and 
motives;  he  recognizes  in  them  an  intelligence  which 
experience  teaches  him  is  frequently  more  than  a 
match  for  his  own.  Some  are  stronger,  some  swifter, 
some  more  cunning;  and  it  is  in  no  way  strange 
that  man  should  not  only  try  to  protect  himself 
against  them  or  to  get  power  over  them  by  charms, 
but  endeavor  by  more  direct  means  to  allay  their 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


37 


hostility  and  make  them  friendly.  Some  kinds  of 
animals,  especially  reptiles,  impress  men,  like  the 
serpent  in  Eden  that  was  “more  subtle  than  any 
beast  of  the  field,”  as  peculiarly  uncanny.  Such 
creatures  seem  not  only  to  have  souls  like  the  rest 
but  to  be  demonic  species,  the  embodiment  of  spirits. 
Men  must  very  early  have  done  something  to  make 
the  animals  they  fed  on  multiply,  and  to  defend 
themselves  not  alone  against  physical  attack  but 
against  their  more  dreaded  spirits;  and  when  any¬ 
thing  begins  that  has  a  semblance  of  worship,  ani¬ 
mals  get  their  share  of  it. 

In  many  parts  of  the  world  we  find  groups  of 
human  beings  calling  themselves  by  the  names  of 
species  familiar  to  them,  and  frequently  regarding 
themselves  as  in  some  way  related  to  the  animals 
of  that  species.  Sometimes  they  tell  a  story  (myth) 
about  being  descended  from  a  primal  ancestor  of 
that  kind.  These  phenomena,  and  the  social  organ¬ 
ization  frequently  accompanying  them,  particularly 
the  rule  that  members  of  such  a  group  must  not 
marry  within  the  group,  have  in  recent  times  re¬ 
ceived  a  great  deal  of  attention  under  the  name 
Totemism,  and  large  theories  about  primitive  civili¬ 
zation  and  religion  have  been  built  on  this  founda¬ 
tion.  The  American  Indians,  from  one  of  whose 
languages  the  word  totem  is  borrowed,  and  the  na- 


38  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


tives  of  Australia,  have  furnished  most  of  the  obser¬ 
vations  upon  which  these  theories  are  based. 

There  are,  however,  other  sufficient  explanations 
of  the  wide  prevalence  of  animal  names  or  of  the 
worship  of  living  animals  or  animal  kinds,  and  it  is 
unwarranted  to  infer  that  wherever  they  are  found 
they  are  connected  with  what  is  called  Totemism. 
Indeed,  one  familiar  with  the  origin  of  myths  may 
be  excused  for  suspecting  that  when  men  of  a  certain 
clan  tell  of  being  kin  to  a  particular  species  of  animal 
or  of  being  descended  from  a  mythical  animal  of  the 
species — especially  if  it  is  in  answer  to  a  European 
inquirer’s  leading  question — this  is  quite  as  likely 
to  be  a  fictitious  explanation  of  why  the  clan  has 
an  animal  name  or  badge  as  that  this  belief  is  the 
true  origin  of  the  fact. 

“Totemism”  in  any  of  its  manifold  definitions  is 
far  from  being  general  among  existing  savages,  and 
it  is  evidently  far  from  primitive.  With  the  ingeni¬ 
ous  hypotheses  that  have  been  built  upon  it  we  need 
not  therefore  at  this  point  concern  ourselves  further. 

The  doings  by  which  we  have  supposed  that  in 
an  earlier  stage  men  defended  themselves  directly 
against  the  attacks  of  the  powers  are  carried  over 
into  the  animistic  stage,  and  are  then  believed  to 
be  efficacious  in  warding  off  the  spirits  that  mean 
harm  to  men ;  and  correspondingly  the  performances 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


39 


by  which  men  imagined  that  they  set  the  powers  of 
nature  to  working  for  them  are  now  believed  to 
work  upon  the  spirits  that  are  operative  in  nature, 
for  instance,  in  bringing  rain  or  multiplying  food. 
One  of  the  results  of  the  conception  of  the  powers  as 
spirits  was,  as  has  been  already  remarked,  to  make 
them  more  like  men;  and  a  consequence  of  this  in 
turn  was  the  belief  that  the  spirits  could  not  only 
be  kept  by  force  from  doing  harm  or  constrained 
to  do  what  men  wanted,  but  that  they  might  be 
persuaded  to  abstain  from  injury  or  to  confer  bene¬ 
fits,  as  men  might  be  in  like  case.  By  the  side  of 
acts  of  aversion  and  constraint,  men  do  things  the 
obvious  meaning  of  which  is  to  please  the  spirits, 
to  placate  them  if  they  seem  to  be  angry,  or  cultivate 
their  friendship  and  dispose  them  to  do  for  man 
what  he  wrants. 

What  men  do  with  this  intention  is  the  same  that 
they  do  to  a  powerful  man  whose  anger  they  have 
incurred  or  whose  friendly  aid  they  seek  to  secure. 
The  universal  means  in  such  dealings  with  their 
fellows  are  gifts,  of  whatever  the  giver  thinks  the 
great  man  would  like  most  and  the  suppliant  is  able 
to  give.  Men  make  similar  gifts  to  the  spirits,  not 
because  they  reason  from  analogy  in  the  way  we 
have  done  in  our  analysis;  the  correspondence  of 
action  follows  the  conception  of  itself  wdthout  con- 


40  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


scious  reasoning.  This  is  the  beginning  of  offerings, 
which  from  this  point  on  play  so  large  a  part  in 
religion. 

When  a  man  brings  a  gift  to  another  to  appease 
his  anger  or  to  gain  a  favor  of  him,  it  is  human 
nature  to  make  the  material  gift  more  acceptable 
and  the  request  more  persuasive  by  magnifying  his 
greatness,  his  power,  his  generosity.  And  in  this 
combination  of  petition  with  praise,  wdiich  may  in¬ 
clude  the  expression  of  gratitude  for  favors  formerly 
received,  we  have  the  beginning  of  prayer  as  the 
concomitant  of  offerings.  The  offering  is,  however, 
even  in  much  more  advanced  religions  a  sine  qua 
non.  The  principle  is  explicit  in  early  Hebrew  law, 
where  God  says,  “No  man  shall  see  my  face  empty- 
handed,”  that  is,  no  one  shall  come  to  a  place  where 
God  is  worshipped  without  bringing  an  offering. 

The  means  thus  employed  to  propitiate  and  per¬ 
suade  spirits  we  recognize  as  distinctively  religious, 
and  can  follow  their  development  and  the  persistence 
of  the  ideas  that  prompt  them  through  the  entire 
subsequent  history.  For  the  means  previously  de¬ 
scribed  by  which  men  try  to  work  nature  directly 
or  by  a  similar  procedure  to  constrain  the  spirits  to 
work  it  for  them  the  word  magical  is  commonly  used. 
Thus  we  come  to  the  controversial  question  of  the 
relation  between  magic  and  religion.  As  not  in- 


SOULS  AND  SPIRITS 


41 


frequently  happens  in  discussions,  the  difficulty  of 
coming  to  an  understanding  often  is  that  the  dis¬ 
putants  are  not  talking  about  the  same  thing. 
Neither  magic  nor  religion  is  a  thing  that  exists  in 
nature  and  needs  only  to  be  specifically  described. 
They  are  names  men  give,  often  very  much  at  ran¬ 
dom,  to  a  great  variety  of  phenomena;  the  word 
magic,  in  particular,  is  sometimes  very  liberally 
extended  to  religious  rites  and  ideas  which  the 
author  wishes  to  brand  as  irrational  or  superstitious. 
Without  attempting  to  define  “  magic/’  which  might 
prove  as  difficult  a  task  as  to  define  religion,  it  is 
convenient  to  distinguish  the  two  in  the  way  already 
indicated,  and  to  restrict  the  word  magic,  so  far  as 
we  have  occasion  to  use  it,  to  what  men  do  in  the 
belief  that  their  acts  are  effective  of  themselves  in 
working  nature,  or  coerce  the  spirits  to  do  what  men 
want;  and  to  apply  the  term  religion  to  things  men 
do  to  ; persuade  spirits  or  gods  to  protect  their  wor¬ 
shippers  and  give  them  their  hearts’  desire. 

If  this  distinction  be  observed,  and  our  hypothesis 
of  the  beginnings  is  sound,  magical  notions  and 
actions  preceded  religious;  the  latter  came  in  in  the 
animistic  stage  by  the  side  of  long-established  mag¬ 
ical  practices,  but  did  not  supersede  them.  Nor 
has  any  religion  ever  succeeded  in  extirpating  magic. 
Both  have  the  same  motive,  self-preservation;  both 


42  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


seek  to  achieve  this  end  by  influencing  the  powers 
on  which  man  is  dependent.  Many  rites  even  in 
the  higher  religions  are  survivals — sometimes  sym¬ 
bolized — of  magical  performances;  and  what  is  of 
greater  moment,  acts  which  in  their  origin  were,  by 
our  definition,  purely  religious,  often  come  to  be 
regarded  as  so  infallibly  effective  that  the  element 
of  persuasion  recedes,  and  the  rite  duly  performed 
is  believed,  at  least  by  the  vulgar,  of  itself  to  ac¬ 
complish  the  desired  result — that  is  to  say,  relapses 
into  what  we  have  defined  as  magic. 


CHAPTER  III 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 

It  has  been  observed  in  a  former  connection  that 
the  character  of  religion  in  its  whole  development 
is  determined  by  two  factors:  What  men  want  to 
secure  by  it  from  the  powers  on  which  they  find 
their  welfare  dependent,  and  what  they  think  about 
the  nature  of  those  powers,  and  that  of  these  factors 
the  priority  belongs  to  the  former.  To  put  this  in 
another  way — the  progress  of  religion,  like  man’s 
whole  progress  in  civilization,  is  the  result  of  grow¬ 
ing  needs;  and  between  the  progress  of  civilization 
in  general  and  progress  in  religion  there  is  not  only 
a  parallel  but  a  constant  interaction.  It  is  in  this 
way  that  from  among  the  horde  of  spirits  some  rise 
above  the  rest  and  become  what,  without  too  great 
strain  on  the  word,  we  may  call  gods.  To  this  proc¬ 
ess,  the  evolution  of  natural  polytheism,  we  now 
turn. 

In  the  savage  state,  under  conditions  where  man 
ordinarily  finds  himself  able  to  satisfy  his  elementary 
wants,  his  dealings  with  the  powers  are  chiefly  con¬ 
cerned  with  self-defense  against  the  evils  that  beset 

him  out  of  the  unknown,  and  with  the  multiplication 

43 


44  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


of  the  animals  and  plants  that  furnish  his  food. 
Every  advancing  step  in  his  way  of  living  makes 
him  more  dependent  on  climatic  influences.  The 
domestication  of  animals  seems  to  assure  him  a 
regular  supply  of  food  in  the  milk  and  flesh  of  his 
flocks;  but  the  failure  of  seasonable  rainfall  is  a 
more  serious  calamity  to  a  pastoral  people  than  to 
the  savage  who  lives  by  hunting  or  fishing.  Men 
begin,  therefore,  to  observe  more  closely  the  recurring 
seasons  of  their  climate  and  often  to  associate  them 
with  the  appearance  and  position  of  certain  stars 
or  constellations  which  are  believed  to  bring  rain. 
The  sky  itself,  in  which  these  phenomena  occur,  and 
the  sun  whose  genial  warmth  makes  vegetation 
flourish  or  with  its  pitiless  heat  burns  the  pastures 
and  dries  up  the  watering  places,  are  the  powers 
which  prosper  or  undo  him.  It  is  not  strange  that 
among  the  hordes  of  the  great  Asiatic  steppes  heaven, 
that  is,  the  sky  itself,  early  became  the  greatest  god. 
To  this  result  the  fact  doubtless  contributed  that  in 
their  wide  migrations  the  heavens  and  the  heavenly 
bodies  alone  accompanied  them,  while  gods  who  had 
earthly  seats  were  left  behind. 

That  Heaven  is  the  great  god  of  the  Mongols  and 
from  the  earliest  times  occupied  a  unique  position 
at  the  head  of  the  Chinese  pantheon  is  probably  to 
be  thus  explained.  Within  the  area  occupied  by 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


45 


the  early  Aryan  peoples  also  the  worship  of  the  sky 
and  the  powers  of  nature  which  manifest  themselves 
in  it  was  the  core  of  the  common  Aryan  religion, 
and  a  similar  inference  may  perhaps  be  drawn  con¬ 
cerning  its  prehistoric  past.  Elsewhere  the  worship 
of  the  heavenly  bodies  seems  to  have  grown  up  in 
the  agricultural  stage. 

Under  other  conditions,  where  nomadic  tribes  oc¬ 
cupied  an  oasis  or  moved  back  and  forth  from  one 
pasture  ground  to  another  within  narrower  limits, 
man’s  chief  dependence  was  on  the  local  powers 
which  furnished  water  and  food  for  the  flocks.  In 
the  animistic  stage  such  spots  became  the  homes  or 
haunts  of  spirits,  to  which  offerings  were  brought 
and  petition  made.  Religious  relations  were  thus 
established  between  them  and  the  tribes  that  fre¬ 
quented  their  habitat,  and  they  were  regarded  as 
bestowers  of  the  fertility  of  the  flocks  which  wTas  so 
intimately  connected  with  abundant  nourishment, 
and  of  other  good  things.  As  the  proprietors  of  the 
place  they  were  invoked  to  protect  their  clients  from 
the  intrusion  of  other  clans,  and,  with  a  natural 
next  step,  to  prosper  them  in  their  own  forays. 
Finally  the  association  with  the  tribe  might  become 
stronger  than  the  connection  with  the  locality,  and 
in  migrating  to  a  new  region  it  might  take  its  god 
along  and  establish  him  in  a  new  home. 


46  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


These  examples  must  suffice  to  illustrate  the  va¬ 
riety  of  development  in  nomadic  religions  under 
diverse  circumstances. 

When  man  takes  to  tilling  the  soil  as  a  principal 
means  of  livelihood  he  makes  himself  still  more  de¬ 
pendent  on  the  forces  of  nature.  If  the  pasture 
fails  in  one  spot  the  shepherd  may  drive  his  flocks 
to  another;  but  the  husbandman  has  no  such  refuge, 
and  famine  may  follow  a  single  intemperate  season. 
What  makes  the  transition  to  agriculture  of  epoch- 
making  importance  in  religion,  however,  is  the  fact 
that  this  transition  takes  place  in  climates  where  the 
forces  of  nature — the  fertile  earth,  seasonable  rain¬ 
fall,  and  the  genial  warmth  of  the  sun — which  make 
agriculture  possible  are  more  constant  and  benefi¬ 
cent.  Man  ploughs  and  sows  and  tills  his  fields  with 
reasonable  expectation  of  a  harvest,  and  ordinarily 
experience  justifies  the  expectation.  He  comes  thus 
to  have  greater  confidence  in  the  powers  that  bestow 
the  increase  of  his  labors  and  to  rely  on  their  habitual 
friendliness,  while  occasional  disappointments  keep 
alive  the  sense  of  his  dependence.  He  therefore 
endeavors  to  insure  the  favor  of  these  powers. 
Every  step  in  the  cultivation  of  the  soil  is  accom¬ 
panied  by  a  corresponding  cultivation  of  the  powers 
which  thus  become  his  most  necessary  gods.  He 
could  not  imagine  that  his  labors  of  themselves 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


47 


would  bring  him  crops  without  this  concomitant. 
Tilling  the  soil  is  not  only  an  art  but  a  religion; 
from  the  breaking  of  the  ground  to  the  ingathering 
of  the  harvest,  religious  rites  attend  every  stage. 

With  these  friendly  powers  the  community  enters 
into  more  regular  relations;  it  establishes  in  its  set¬ 
tlements  permanent  places  of  worship  and  public 
festivals.  Sometimes  the  nature  gods  take  their 
place  under  their  own  names,  sometimes  older  tribal 
or  local  deities  assume  agricultural  functions  and 
are  transformed  by  them.  In  either  case,  as  gods 
of  the  community,  they  not  only  give  the  blessings 
of  nature,  but  are  its  protectors  and  champions  and 
benefactors  in  all  things  besides.  The  things  that 
are  done  to  obtain  from  these  powers  fruitful  seasons 
and  abundant  harvests  often  have  all  the  appear¬ 
ance  of  magical  ceremonies,  and  doubtless  in  their 
origin  "were  such.  But  they  change  their  signifi¬ 
cance,  when,  from  being  means  of  working  nature 
or  coercing  the  spirits  that  work  it,  they  become 
part  of  the  cultus  of  kindly  gods,  and  when  men 
begin  to  rely  on  the  benevolence  of  the  gods  rather 
than  on  the  inherent  efficacy  of  the  rite.  J 

This  change  of  attitude  toward  the  powers  is  not 
the  only  consequence  of  the  transition  to  agriculture. 
Under  various  conditions,  of  which  increasing  den¬ 
sity  of  population  was  probably  the  most  important, 


48  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


cultivation  of  the  soil  became  the  chief  occupation 
and  living  of  the  people,  and  with  it  came  settle¬ 
ment  in  villages  and  towns,  presently  walled  for 
defense  against  invading  nomads  or  hostile  neigh¬ 
bors;  and  thereupon  ensued  great  changes  in  the 
social  organization.  The  oldest  high  civilizations 
with  which  history  acquaints  us  lay  in  the  valley  of 
the  Nile,  the  lower  valley  of  the  Euphrates  and  Ti¬ 
gris,  and  the  valley  of  the  Yellow  River  in  China. 
In  all  three  the  inexhaustible  fertility  of  the  alluvial 
soil  and  favorable  climatic  conditions,  yielding 
abundant  living  with  little  labor,  made  it  possible 
for  the  population  to  multiply  to  a  point  which  ren¬ 
dered  it  necessary  to  extend  the  irrigable  area  or 
to  restrain  devastating  floods  by  control  of  the  riv¬ 
ers — engineering  undertakings  on  a  scale  which  could 
be  accomplished  only  by  united  effort  organized 
under  central  authority  more  permanently  in  action 
than  the  war  chiefs  of  the  tribe  or  the  horde. 

Communal  cultivation  was  succeeded  by  private 
property  in  land;  arts  and  crafts  multiplied;  trade 
and  commerce  began,  and  all  this  demanded  laws 
and  an  administration  of  law  adapted  to  far  more 
complex  conditions  than  the  customary  right  of  no¬ 
madic  tribes,  while  at  the  same  time  tribal  mores 
lost  much  of  their  authority  by  the  fusion  of  differ¬ 
ent  clans  or  tribes  in  a  settled  population.  Towns 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


49 


grew  into  cities;  the  city-states  were  united  into 
larger  kingdoms,  and  eventually  into  the  oldest  em¬ 
pires,  with  greater  and  more  various  powers  con¬ 
centrated  in  the  person  of  the  sovereign. 

The  new  political  organization  was  reflected  in 
the  conception  of  the  gods,  who  came  to  be  not 
merely  protectors  and  benefactors  of  the  people,  but 
divine  rulers  corresponding  to  earthly  kings.  As  the 
human  ruler  was  the  voice  of  the  law  and  the  vindi¬ 
cator  of  rights,  so  the  customs  of  the  community, 
its  common  law,  and  later,  as  we  see,  for  example, 
in  the  code  of  Hammurabi,  its  statutory  law,  came 
to  be  regarded  as  having  divine  authority  and  often 
divine  origin.  A  new  relation  was  thus  established 
between  the  community  and  its  gods.  The  public 
religion  became  a  function  of  the  state,  the  state  an 
organ  of  religion.  The  king  acquired  a  religious 
character  as  head  of  the  religion,  and  was  often  be¬ 
lieved  to  be  himself  of  divine  race.  The  gods  them¬ 
selves  grew  steadily  greater  with  the  larger  and  more 
varied  demands  upon  them  in  peace  and  war. 

The  process,  the  different  stages  of  which  we  have 
been  sketching,  is  of  fundamental  import  for  the 
whole  future  of  religion;  for  it  is  by  becoming  com¬ 
pletely  human  that  the  gods  become  moral.  The 
forces  of  nature  as  they  exhibit  themselves  in  their 
operations  are  not  moral;  no  more  are  the  spirits 


50  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


with  which  the  animistic  savage  identifies  them. 
The  initial  personification  of  the  spirits  only  makes 
their  doings  seem  capricious.  They  have  no  mores  ; 
they  do  what  they  like,  regardless  of  all  the  restraints 
that  keep  even  the  most  reckless  savage  from  doing 
many  things  he  would  like  to  do.  It  is  only  by 
becoming  progressively  humanized  that  the  gods  be¬ 
come  morally  responsible  beings,  and  eventually 
ideals  of  human  perfection  projected  into  the  divine. 
Nor  is  the  humanizing  of  the  gods  the  whole  thing; 
they  must  learn  to  take  their  place  in  an  organized 
human  society,  that  is  to  say,  they  have  to  be  civi¬ 
lized. 

To  the  humanizing  and  civilizing  of  the  gods  two 
factors  principally  contribute,  'worship  and  myth. 
A  regular  and  orderly  worship  requires  a  place  where 
the  worshipper  is  sure  to  find  the  god.  Men  early 
believed  that  in  certain  places  or  natural  objects 
they  had  in  some  way  discovered  the  presence  of  a 
god,  to  whom  they  then  brought  their  offerings  and 
made  their  requests.  In  other  cases  they  them¬ 
selves  selected  some  object  to  be  the  habitation  of 
the  god  and  invoked  him  to  enter  into  it  and  make 
it  his  abode,  and  in  the  conviction  that  he  is  there, 
offer  their  worship  before  it.  It  makes  much  less 
difference  than  we  are  apt  to  think  where  or  in  what 
kind  of  an  object  man  believes  the  deity  to  be  lodged 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


51 


— a  mountain,  a  rock,  a  tree,  an  animal,  or  one  of 
the  heavenly  bodies;  or  in  a  stone  or  post  men  have 
set  up  for  the  purpose.  Stock-and-stone  worship, 
the  rude  precursor  of  idolatry,  is  often  looked  down 
upon  as  something  degraded  and  degrading.  We 
should  do  more  wisely  if  we  recognized  in  it  a  simple- 
minded  attempt  to  realize  the  presence  of  deity — - 
the  same  motive  that  leads  us  to  consecrate  houses 
of  worship.  For  in  this  stage  it  is  not  the  material 
object  that  is  worshipped,  but  the  unseen  power  or 
the  spiritual  being  in  it.  The  rude  stone  or  post 
may  be  roughly  shaped  into  an  image,  and  the 
archaic  idol  may  be  succeeded  by  a  masterpiece 
of  art;  the  hut  that  sheltered  the  village  fetish 
may  be  replaced  by  an  imposing  temple;  but  this 
eesthetic  evolution  does  not  change  the  essential 
idea. 

Men  believe  themselves  to  have  ascertained  by 
experience  by  what  means  the  favor  of  the  gods  is 
gained  or  recovered.  In  the  course  of  time  these 
grow  into  a  considerable  body  of  ritual,  and  as  their 
efficacy  depends  on  the  exactness  of  the  performance, 
the  primitive  custodian  of  the  holy  place  is  succeeded 
by  a  priesthood,  which  preserves  the  tradition  and 
sees  that  the  rites  are  duly  performed.  It  is  of 
recognized  importance  also  that  the  community 
should  have  means  of  inquiring  the  will  and  purpose 


52  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


of  the  gods,  and  the  priests  often  become  ministers 
of  the  oracle  as  well  as  of  the  cultus. 

The  constant  elements  in  the  cultus  of  the  gods 
are  offering  and  prayer.  The  most  primitive  offer¬ 
ings  were  probably  things  to  eat,  and  the  belief  long 
persisted  that  they  were  really  the  food  of  the  gods. 
The  resemblance  to  the  provision  of  food  for  dead 
kinsmen  or  their  spirits  is  obvious,  but  it  does  not 
necessarily  follow  that  the  latter  was  the  origin  of 
all  like  offerings  to  spirits  or  gods,  any  more  than 
it  can  be  proved  that  all  gods  were  originally  an¬ 
cestral  spirits. 

The  common  conception  of  offerings  in  this  stage 
is  that  they  are  gifts  to  the  gods,  though  some,  such 
as  the  sacrifice  of  firstlings  and  of  the  first-fruits  of 
agriculture,  which  are  in  fact  of  different  origin, 
were  obligatory,  a  tribute  due  to  the  powers  that 
gave  the  increase.  Many  other  things  precious  in 
the  eyes  of  men  are  also  dedicated  to  the  gods. 

Sacrifices,  public  or  private,  were  often  the  oc¬ 
casion  of  sacrificial  feasts.  On  the  totemistic  theory, 
the  victim  was  in  primitive  apprehension  the  divine 
animal  of  the  clan  from  which  the  offerers  imagine 
themselves  to  be  sprung.  By  eating  together  the 
flesh  of  their  ancestor,  the  clan  draws  new  life  and 
power  from  the  source,  and  its  members  are  bound 
together  by  the  bond  of  blood  kinship./  A  more 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


53 


probable  explanation  is  that  the  food  which  is  offered 
at  the  holy  place  or  with  religious  rites  is  brought 
into  the  sphere  of  “  holiness,”  and  acquires  divine 
virtues,  which  are  imparted  to  those  who  eat  it,  giv¬ 
ing  health  and  strength  and  happiness.  The  sense 
of  fellowship,  not  only  with  one  another,  but  with 
the  deity  at  whose  abode  they  are  gathered,  so  to 
speak  as  guests  at  his  table,  is  a  further  consequence. 
The  sacrificial  meal  had  therefore  a  sacramental 
character,  though  not  in  the  totemistic  sense,  and 
the  participants  had  a  religious  experience  in  the 
consciousness  of  the  nearness  and  the  friendliness  of 
the  god. 

Prayer,  in  both  its  elements  of  praise  and  petition, 
presumes  a  personal  relation,  and  in  exercise  strength¬ 
ens  the  feeling  of  personal  intercourse  between  man 
and  god.  This  is  peculiarly  the  case  in  supplication, 
and  in  the  responsive  assurance  that  the  request  is 
granted,  which  again  is  a  real  religious  experience. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  tendency  of  early  ritual  to 
make  of  praise  and  prayer  charms  potent  over  the 
gods  themselves — what  I  have  called  elsewhere  a  re¬ 
version  to  the  notion  of  a  magical  efficacy  in  a  form 
of  words — depersonalizes  the  relation,  and  in  some 
religions  this  consequence  has  gone  very  far. 

A  second  factor  which  conduces  to  the  humanizing 
of  the  gods  is  myth.  A  myth  in  the  simplest  mean- 


54  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


ing  of  the  word  is  an  explanation  of  something,  an 
answer  to  some  question,  in  the  form  of  a  story  of 
what  happened  once  upon  a  time.  The  oldest  myths 
are  in  all  probability  answers  to  questions  about 
nature  which  human  curiosity  early  and  almost 
everywhere  raised,  such  as,  “What  holds  the  sky 
up?” — the  sky  being  universally  supposed  to  be  a 
kind  of  dish  cover  over  the  world,  with  a  reservoir 
of  rain-water  above  it.  Or  the  question  may  shape 
itself,  “How  did  the  sky  get  up  there?” — that  is, 
for  the  savage  mind,  “  Who  put  it  up  there  ?  ”  Such 
Atlas  myths  are  found  in  many  lands.  Another 
common  type  of  myth  is  an  answer  to  the  question 
why  man  is  mortal — death  always  seeming  to  be 
something  unnatural — or,  how  man  failed  to  attain 
immortality  like  the  gods.  The  most  familiar  ex¬ 
ample  to  us  is  the  story  of  the  Garden  in  Eden, 
where  man,  in  his  reprehensible  ambition  to  be 
equal  to  the  gods,  having  eaten  of  the  forbidden  tree 
of  knowledge,  was  driven  away  from  the  tree  of  life 
whose  fruit  would  have  rendered  him  immortal. 
Others  asked  why  man  is  part  mortal  and  part  im¬ 
mortal,  and  answered  that  he  was  made  of  clay 
mixed  with  the  blood  of  a  god,  or  that  the  breath 
of  a  god  was  breathed  into  an  earthen  image  model¬ 
led  by  the  god’s  hand. 

Among  races  that  have  imagination  and  the  poetic 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


55 


gift  such  rudimentary  myths  are  developed  into 
longer  stories  embellished  with  incident  and  episode, 
such,  for  example,  as  the  Maori  myth  of  the  ele¬ 
vation  of  the  sky,  which  tells  how  the  children  of 
heaven  and  earth  finding  the  quarters  too  narrow 
for  them  wdiile  their  parents  lay  locked  in  close 
embrace,  after  much  debate  and  with  mighty  effort 
hoisted  their  father  sky  aloft,  and  made  room  for 
themselves  on  mother  earth.  Many  myths  poeti¬ 
cally  represent  the  sun  as  voyaging  across  the  sky 
in  a  boat  or  driving  a  fiery  chariot  from  the  east  to 
the  west,  and  may  then  go  on  to  explain  how  the 
sun  gets  back  again  every  night  to  his  starting-point 
through  the  dark  north  or  by  an  underground  tunnel. 
Myths  of  this  kind,  whatever  part  gods  may  play 
in  them,  are  not  originally  religious,  though  they 
may  be  adopted  by  religion. 

Many  myths,  again,  are  explanations  of  the  cul- 
tus — how  men  learned  that  such  and  such  a  god  was 
to  be  worshipped  at  a  certain  place  or  in  a  peculiar 
way;  while  others,  sometimes  called  culture  myths, 
tell  of  the  origin  of  agriculture  and  the  arts,  how 
they  were  first  taught  by  a  god,  or  invented  by  a 
man  who  later  became  a  god. 

When  once  the  imagination  has  taken  the  gods  and 
their  doings  for  a  subject,  many  myths  are  created 
or  embellished  more  out  of  delight  in  story-telling 


56  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


than  of  questionings  about  nature  or  religion;  but 
as  they  attach  themselves  to  the  same  figures  they 
contribute  to  the  great  tissue  of  mythology.  In  the 
myths,  the  gods,  in  whatever  bodily  shape  they  are 
imagined,  are  in  thought  and  feeling  and  act  com¬ 
pletely  human.  Human  imagination  has  no  other 
materials  for  its  kaleidoscopic  combinations  than 
fragments  of  human  experience,  however  it  may 
magnify  them,  and  the  doings  of  the  gods  as  they 
are  told  in  story  are  frequently  “all  too  human.” 

These  stories  about  the  gods  help  men  to  imagine 
them  as  magnified  and  glorified  men  and  women, 
with  individualities  of  their  own  that  are  not  simply 
the  reflection  of  their  spheres  of  activity.  Even  the 
less  edifying  tales  only  make  the  likeness  stronger 
and  create  a  human  fellow-feeling.  In  the  progress 
of  civilization  such  myths  became  repugnant  to 
more  refined  taste  or  a  more  elevated  morality,  and 
objection  is  made  to  the  scandalous  chronicles  of  the 
poets  in  which  the  gods  do  all  manner  of  things 
that  would  not  be  tolerated  in  decent  human  so¬ 
ciety.  But  here  again,  the  very  idea  that  gods 
should  set  a  good  example  to  men  is  the  last  con¬ 
sequence  of  their  complete  humanity. 

The  rise  of  some  of  the  powers  to  the  superior 
rank  of  great  gods  did  not  dispossess  their  humbler 
colleagues  who  ruled  over  particular  departments  of 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


57 


nature  or  of  human  life.  Indeed  the  more  numerous 
needs  of  men  in  the  progress  of  civilization  tended 
in  the  first  instance  to  multiply  the  powers  that 
presided  over  them.  The  greater  gods,  however, 
as  the  gods  of  the  city  or  the  nation,  its  protectors 
and  benefactors,  were  more  and  more  frequently 
appealed  to  by  the  community  and  its  individual 
members  in  every  need;  and  they  thus  came  to  as¬ 
sume  a  multitude  of  offices  that  had  earlier  been 
distributed  among  special  functional  powers,  and 
to  absorb  these  powers  in  themselves.  The  names 
of  these  minor  spirits  often  became  titles  or  epithets 
of  the  god  in  whom  they  lost  their  identity;  and 
under  these  specific  titles  he  was  appealed  to  to  do 
the  things  which  had  originally  been  the  business 
of  the  owner  of  the  name.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
name  of  one  or  another  of  the  great  gods  is  fre¬ 
quently  appropriated  by  local  deities  which  had 
previously  been  designated  only  by  the  name  of  the 
place  or  by  some  local  title. 

No  stage  in  the  development  of  religion  is  a  breach 
with  its  past — even  the  most  radical  reform  is  not 
such  a  breach.  In  natural  polytheism  the  demons 
who  do  harm  to  men  in  manifold  ways  keep  their 
old  place  and  are  as  mischievous  as  ever.  The  magi¬ 
cal  performances  that  were  believed  to  drive  away 
or  expel  them  or  to  thwart  their  malevolent  in- 


58  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


tentions  flourish  no  less  than  before,  and  have  in 
fact  perpetuated  themselves  everywhere  through  all 
changes  of  religion  to  the  present  time.  But  in 
polytheisms  such  as  we  are  now  describing  men  also 
invoke  the  protection  of  the  gods  against  the  mach¬ 
inations  of  the  demons.  Sometimes  this  goes  no 
farther  than  the  introduction  into  the  charm  of  an 
appeal  to  the  gods  by  name;  sometimes  it  takes  a 
more  independent  and  distinctly  religious  form. 
Finally  it  may  be  taught  that  the  demons  have  no 
independent  power  to  work  their  malice  on  men, 
but  are  only  permitted  to  do  so  as  ministers  of 
vengeance  wdien  men  have  incurred  the  wrath  of 
the  gods.  This  theory,  however,  never  supplanted 
in  popular  belief  their  independent  malevolence. 

It  is  sometimes  said  that  between  religion  and 
magic  there  is  from  first  to  last  a  strong  antagonism. 
This  view  of  the  matter  follows  from  a  definition 
of  magic  in  which  the  antagonism  is  already  con¬ 
tained:  natural  religion,  it  is  said,  is  social,  its  end 
is  the  common  welfare;  magic  is  antisocial,  it  is 
resorted  to  for  ends  that  are  incompatible  with  the 
good  of  society,  most  commonly  to  do  harm  to 
others.  Consequently  the  community  in  self-de¬ 
fense  tries  to  root  it  out  and  religion  treats  it  as 
obnoxious  to  the  gods.  In  the  wider  sense  in  which 
we  have  used  the  term,  magic  may  be  employed  for 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


59 


social  as  well  as  antisocial  ends,  and  enters  largely 
into  the  rites  of  religion  itself.  The  distinction  be¬ 
tween  aversive  magic,  the  warding  off  of  demonic 
assaults  on  the  individual  or  the  group,  and  produc¬ 
tive  magic,  to  multiply  the  food-supply,  on  the  one  side, 
and  mischievous  magic  on  the  other,  was  early  made, 
and  persists  in  the  discrimination  between  the  “  white,” 
or  licit,  magic  of  self-protection  and  the  black  art. 

To  productive  magic  incidental  reference  has  been 
made  at  an  earlier  point  in  our  inquiry.  Such 
performances  as  Spencer  and  Gillen  have  described 
among  the  tribes  of  Central  Australia  are  of  this 
kind,  each  group  having  the  art  of  multiplying  a 
particular  species  of  animal  or  plant  used  for  food. 
What  may  be  called  corn-dances  are  believed  in 
many  parts  of  the  world  to  have  similar  effects  on 
the  growth  of  the  crops. 

With  the  domestication  of  animals,  the  multi¬ 
plying  power  not  only  for  their  own  kind  but  for 
vegetation  seemed  to  be  embodied  in  certain  species 
of  eminent  procreative  ability  and  propensity  such 
as  the  bull  and  the  he-goat,  and  they  became  gods 
of  pastoral  tribes,  and  eventually  of  their  agricul¬ 
tural  successors,  who  continued  to  be  largely  depen¬ 
dent  for  food  on  their  flocks  and  herds.  In  the 
pastoral  stage  probably  arose  the  offering  of  the  first¬ 
lings,  to  which  later  the  first-fruits  of  the  soil  were 


60  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


added,  the  underlying  notion  being  that  if  these  were 
appropriated  by  men  the  dam  would  thereafter  be 
barren  or  the  crops  would  fail.  An  excrescence, 
which  so  far  as  the  evidence  goes  occurs  only  in 
civilization,  is  the  offering  of  first-born  sons.  In  the 
age  in  which  we  know  them,  both  firstlings  of  men 
and  animals  were  regarded  as  sacrifices  to  the  gods. 

A  widely  distributed  type  of  fertility  magic,  which 
also  was  eventually  taken  up  into  religion,  rests  on 
the  primitive  assumption  of  what  we  might  call  in 
Stoic  phrase  the  sympathy  of  nature,  more  exactly, 
the  identity  of  the  reproductive  process  in  all  nature, 
animal  and  vegetative.  In  consequence  it  was  be¬ 
lieved  that  the  germination  of  the  seed  and  abun¬ 
dance  of  increase  could  be  promoted  by  the  exercise 
of  the  generative  function  by  human  beings,  origi¬ 
nally  no  doubt  by  the  cultivators  in  their  own  fields. 
More  or  less  attenuated  survivals  of  these  rites  have 
been  perpetuated  in  several  parts  of  modern  Europe. 

When  an  agricultural  religion  developed,  this  old 
automatic  fertility  magic,  which  had  to  begin  with 
nothing  to  do  with  spirits  or  gods,  could  attach 
itself  to  any  deity  that  was  believed  to  give  the 
increase  to  the  husbandman’s  labors — an  earth  god¬ 
dess,  for  instance,  or  an  astral  divinity  connected 
with  the  germinating  season — without  regard  to  the 
other  associations  of  the  god.  In  Western  Asia  they 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


61 


were  frequently,  but  by  no  means  exclusively,  con¬ 
nected  with  a  great  goddess  of  fertility  worshipped 
under  many  names. 

Town  dwellers  transferred  them,  with  the  rest 
of  their  vegetation  magic  or  cultus,  to  the  sacred 
precincts  in  the  town,  where  agricultural  festivals 
were  celebrated.  The  effect  of  detachment  from 
the  fields  and  attachment  to  a  seat  of  public  wor¬ 
ship  was  the  loss  of  their  primitive  specific  signifi¬ 
cance.  This  is  one — perhaps  the  oldest — root  of 
sanctuary  prostitution,  and  is  probably  reflected  in 
many  “ sacred  marriages”  and  in  myths  of  the  inter¬ 
course  of  gods  with  nymphs  or  mortals.  Other 
origins  need  not  be  discussed  here. 

These  rites  appear  chiefly  in  the  agricultural  stage, 
and  persist  in  higher  religions.  They  are  misinter¬ 
preted  when  they  are  represented  as  survivals  of 
the  “phallolatry,”  which  some  modern  writers  take 
for  a  primitive,  or  the  primitive,  religion,  inspired  by 
the  mystery  of  reproduction.  “ Primitive”  man  is 
near  enough  a  healthy  animal  not  to  be  a  victim  of 
the  obsession  of  sex,  which  is  in  fact  a  degenerative 
phenomenon  of  decadent  civilization. 

Fertility  magic  of  a  different  kind  is  one  of  the 
origins  of  human  sacrifice.  Among  the  Kandhs  in 
Bengal,  for  example,  a  victim  bought  for  the  pur¬ 
pose  was  killed,  and  the  flesh  was  distributed  among 


62  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


the  villagers  to  be  planted  in  their  fields.  The  rites 
have  become  assimilated  to  a  sacrifice  to  an  earth 
goddess,  but  the  primitive  part  of  them  appears  to 
be  purely  magical — the  flesh  and  blood  or  the  ashes 
put  in  the  ground  made  the  crops  grow. 

In  some  barbaric  civilizations  the  slaughter  of 
human  victims  to  promote  the  abundance  of  the 
crops  had  an  exorbitant  place  in  the  public  religion 
and  was  more  completely  transformed  into  sacrifice. 
In  Mexico,  the  designated  victim  in  some  cults  was 
treated  as  a  vegetative  god,  and  eventually  sacrificed 
to  the  sun-god,  but  this  is  probably  an  ultimate 
development  of  what  was  to  begin  with  agricultural 
magic.  In  general,  human  sacrifice  in  the  proper 
sense  of  an  offering  to  the  gods  appears  in  civilization 
rather  than  the  savage  state,  though  human  piacula 
are  not  uncommon,  and  the  slaughter  of  captives  in 
war  to  appease  the  spirits  of  fallen  'warriors  by  a 
ritualized  vengeance  is  also  old.  The  killing  of 
wives  and  slaves,  attendants  and  officials,  to  accom¬ 
pany  the  dead  master  or  chief  to  the  other  world  is 
not  properly  called  sacrifice  at  all. 

Aversive  magic  survives  in  many  rites  which  when 
taken  up  into  religion  become  piacular.  Things 
which  experience,  or  misinterpretation  of  experience, 
taught  men  to  treat  as  ultradangerous — the  prox¬ 
imity  of  death,  for  instance — were  believed  to  com- 


THE  EMERGENCE  OF  GODS 


63 


municate  to  those  who  came  within  their  sphere  a 
kind  of  physical  contagion  which  could  be  physically 
removed.  In  the  next  stage  the  effect  was  attributed 
to  demonic  agency,  which  the  same  means  served 
to  counteract.  Finally,  contact  with  such  things, 
as  demonic,  was  believed  to  render  men  obnoxious 
to  the  gods,  and  to  require  expiation.  The  old  per¬ 
formances  thus  gained  a  new  significance.  One 
widely  distributed  method  of  riddance  in  a  great 
variety  of  forms  is  commonly  called,  from  the  Old 
Testament  example,  “scapegoat  rites/’  The  evil, 
which  may  be  an  epidemic  ailment  such  as  small¬ 
pox,  demonic  influences,  religious  guilt,  etc.,  is  laden 
in  a  boat  and  let  drift  down  a  river  or  off  to  sea,  or 
it  is  transferred  to  an  animal,  which  is  then  driven 
far  away,  and  sometimes  killed  to  keep  it  from 
coming  back  with  its  ill-omened  burden.  When  the 
bearer  was  a  human  being,  the  latter  fate  is  often 
erroneously  classed  under  human  sacrifice. 

Upon  the  stage  of  polytheism  religions  become 
vastly  more  diversified  than  previously,  correspond¬ 
ing  to  the  increasing  diversity  of  civilization  as  a 
whole  under  historical,  social,  and  economic  con¬ 
ditions,  and  the  growing  individuality  of  races  and 
peoples.  Into  this  wide  field  we  cannot  enter  here; 
it  must  suffice  to  have  indicated  the  main  directions 
of  development. 


CHAPTER  IV 


MORALS  AND  RELIGION 

At  several  points  in  the  previous  chapters  we  have 
touched  incidentally  on  the  relations  between  morals 
and  religion,  but  the  subject  is  of  such  importance 
as  to  demand  a  fuller  discussion.  The  words  “  mor¬ 
als,”  “morality,”  “ethics,”  “ethical,”  show  in  their 
etymology  the  primitive  association  of  the  ideas  with 
the  custom  of  the  community.  No  human  society 
even  of  the  most  rudimentary  kind  could  exist  with¬ 
out  customs,  collectively  constituting  its  mores,  to 
which  all  its  members  are  bound  to  conform,  and 
habitually  do  conform.  In  this  conformity,  and  in 
nothing  else,  primitive  morality  consists.  Many  of 
their  customs  have  nothing  to  do  with  what  we  call 
morals,  others  are  so  repugnant  to  our  ethics  that 
we  stigmatize  them  as  grossly  immoral;  but  by  the 
historical  criterion  both  were  moral  and  as  such 
obligatory.  Custom  is  more  than  this:  to  the  indi¬ 
vidual  by  habit  it  becomes  second  nature,  and  is 
obeyed  with  a  kind  of  acquired  instinct. 

Many  of  the  customs  are  essential  to  the  well¬ 
being  of  the  community  and  even  to  its  perpetuation, 

and  violation  of  the  mores  in  this  sphere  excites  the 

64 


MORALS  AND  RELIGION 


65 


resentment  of  the  whole  group,  the  instant  reaction 
of  its  instinct  of  self-preservation,  which  breaks  out 
on  the  transgressor  and  may  go  the  length  of  killing 
him  or  expelling  him  as  an  outlaw.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  whole  group  feels  and  manifests  its  ap¬ 
proval  of  signal  fidelity  to  its  mores,  for  example,  in 
the  swift  and  ruthless  pursuit  of  blood  vengeance,  in 
bravery  in  defense  or  attack,  or  in  the  fundamental 
peaceful  virtues  of  primitive  society,  generosity, 
hospitality  and  the  like — in  short  all  behavior 
conspicuously  exemplifying  what  the  mores  re¬ 
quire. 

Both  resentment  and  approval  have  varying  de¬ 
grees  of  emotional  intensity,  depending  on  the  deed, 
the  doer,  and  the  circumstances.  The  important 
thing  is  that  all  members  of  the  group  share  individ¬ 
ually  in  these  feelings,  and  that  the  pitch  of  the 
common  emotion  is  raised  by  the  contagion  of  senti¬ 
ment  in  the  mass  and  by  the  common  acts  in  which 
its  indignation  or  approbation  finds  an  outlet,  as 
when  an  offender  is  put  to  death  by  stoning  in  which 
everybody  takes  a  hand.  The  enormity  of  such 
offense  is  thus  profoundly  impressed  on  all. 

If  we  introduce  our  familiar  categories  into  this 
description  of  rudimentary  morality,  we  shall  call 
“wrong”  whatever  excites  the  indignation  or  resent¬ 
ment  of  the  group  as  a  whole,  and  what  arouses  its 


66  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


universal  approbation  we  shall  call  “right,”  always 
understanding  “right”  and  “wrong”  for  the  mem¬ 
bers  of  the  group  and  within  it. 

Conformity  to  the  standards  of  right  and  wrong 
in  the  sense  thus  defined  is  expected  of  every  member 
of  the  community,  and  the  conscious  response  of  the 
individual  to  this  expectation,  or  his  participation 
in  it,  is  the  feeling  of  “ought,”  or,  as  we  say,  the 
sense  of  moral  obligation. 

In  many  savage  communities  certain  fundamental 
articles  of  the  tribal  mores  are  inculcated  upon  the 
young  men  when  they  come  to  the  age  to  be  admit¬ 
ted  to  the  manhood  of  the  tribe,  and  the  rites  of 
initiation  are  frequently  of  a  terrifying  or  painful 
kind,  adapted  to  make  an  indelible  impression  on 
the  initiate.  Among  the  Basutos,  for  example,  a 
severe  flogging  fixes  in  memory  the  injunctions: 
“Do  not  steal;  do  not  commit  adultery  (also  an 
offense  against  property) ;  honor  your  parents;  obey 
your  chiefs.”  Some  Australian  natives  enjoin:  “Be 
obedient  to  your  elders;  share  everything  with  your 
friends;  live  in  peace;  do  not  assault  girls  or  married 
women.”  Examples  of  such  summaries  of  morals 
could  easily  be  multiplied.  The  second  table  of  the 
Mosaic  decalogue,  Thou  shalt  not  kill,  thou  shalt  not 
commit  adultery,  thou  shalt  not  steal,  will  occur  to 
every  one.  The  precepts  of  Leviticus  19  take  a 


MORALS  AND  RELIGION 


67 


wider  range,  and  include  manners,  as  early  morality 
always  does,  and  as  the  Latin  mores  testifies. 

"When  a  man  has  done  what  the  mores  of  the 
community  forbid  or  failed  to  do  what  they  demand, 
he  experiences  its  resentment  not  only  outwardly 
but  inwardly;  he  shares  it  and  turns  it  upon  himself 
as  remorse.  In  such  an  experience  is  the  most  prob¬ 
able  origin  of  what  we  call  a  reproving  conscience,  as 
on  the  other  hand  man’s  participation  in  the  social 
approbation  bestowed  on  him  when  he  has  done 
well  is  an  approving  conscience.  Again,  the  antici¬ 
pation  of  this  experience  becomes  a  moral  motive 
in  the  prevenient  conscience,  and  ultimately  the 
imperative  of  moral  obligation. 

The  high  level  of  morals  in  such  points  as  honesty, 
trustworthiness,  fidelity,  among  many  savage  tribes 
has  often  been  attested,  as  well  as  their  native  good 
manners,  and  the  deterioration  of  both  in  contact 
with  what  call  themselves  higher  civilizations  is 
frequently  commented  on.  This  does  not  come 
about  solely  because  the  representatives  of  civili¬ 
zation  are  often  themselves  depraved;  well-inten¬ 
tioned  missionary  enterprise  sometimes  has  a  similar 
effect,  the  introduction  of  an  alien  code  of  mores 
confusing  standards  and  invalidating  sanctions. 

The  effective  operation  of  tribal  morality  of  the 
kind  we  have  been  dealing  with  is  dependent  on  the 


68  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


homogeneity  of  the  group  and  the  unanimity  and 
emphasis  of  its  censure  or  applause.  We  are  most 
familiar  with  such  a  situation  in  the  imperative  of 
social  usage.  Its  unwritten  code  is  purely  con¬ 
ventional,  neither  rational  nor  moral,  and  for  that 
reason  it  is  incontrovertible.  The  feeling  we  have 
about  an  unintentional  breach  of  etiquette  is  a  real 
remorse  and  often  more  poignant  than  we  experience 
over  the  commission  of  an  act  which  is  contrary  to 
our  moral  standards  but  is  easily  condoned  in  our 
circle.  Less  than  a  century  ago  men  of  the  highest 
character  killed  one  another  in  the  duel,  though  the 
law  and  the  church  called  it  murder,  because  the 
code  of  honor  prescribed  that  remedy  for  certain 
wrongs,  rather  than  face  the  social  outlawry  that 
a  refusal  incurred  among  gentlemen.  We  are  all 
acquainted,  at  least  by  hearsay,  with  the  professional 
code  of  honest  gamblers.  Such  modern  instances 
enable  us  to  understand  the  coercive  power  of  the 
mores  in  early  society.  They  admitted  no  casuis¬ 
tical  discussion;  their  imperative  was  absolute;  the 
consequence  of  transgression  was  outlawry. 

This  whole  development  is  independent  of  religion 
and  its  premises.  Religion  did  not  create  the  idea 
of  right  and  wrong  nor  of  moral  obligation;  it  did 
not  generate  conscience;  nor  did  it  contribute  to 
the  content  of  primitive  morality  anything  but  its 


MORALS  AND  RELIGION 


69 


own  customs  as  part  of  the  general  mores.  The 
conception  of  conscience  as  a  kind  of  transcendental 
moral  law  characteristic  of  human  nature  as  such, 
by  which  man  intuitively  knows  what  is  right  and 
what  is  wrong,  having  the  authority  of  a  categorical 
imperative,  and  armed  to  punish  the  transgressor 
with  remorse  as  a  kind  of  divine  judgment  within 
him,  is  as  much  a  figment  as  a  specific  innate  religious 
faculty.  The  enlarging  scope  of  morals  is  solely  the 
result  of  the  progress  of  society  in  civilization  with 
its  more  complex  relations. 

Very  early,  however,  there  was  given  to  the  savage 
mores  an  extra-social  sanction  of  immense  force. 
Men  on  the  lowest  planes  of  culture  believe  not  only 
that  by  doing  certain  things  they  can  defend  them¬ 
selves  against  hostile  powers  or  placate  them,  and 
by  other  means  can  get  the  powers  to  do  things  for 
them,  but  that  there  are  things  they  must  not  do 
on  peril  of  disaster  or  destruction.  There  are  objects 
they  must  not  touch,  places  on  which  they  must  not 
intrude,  acts  from  which  they  must  unconditionally 
refrain.  They  have  been  taught  by  experience, 
interpreted  by  post  hoc  propter  hoc,  the  universal 
fallacy  in  the  interpretation  of  experience,  that  the 
doing  of  these  things  is  deadly.  A  classic  example 
in  the  books  is  a  story  of  a  negro  on  the  west  coast 
of  Africa  who  broke  off  a  piece  of  iron  from  an 


70  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


anchor  found  on  the  shore  to  make  a  hoe.  Next 
day  he  suddenly  died.  Evidently  the  thing  had 
killed  him,  and  would  kill  anybody  else  that  meddled 
with  it.  A  multitude  of  things  in  the  savage’s  world 
seem  to  be  charged  with  an  occult  force,  a  kind  of 
magical  electric  current,  we  might  say,  as  mysterious 
and  deadly  as  the  physical  kind.  The  slightest  con¬ 
tact  with  them,  intentional  or  accidental,  and  even 
too  close  proximity  to  them,  suffices  to  draw  the 
deadly  discharge. 

The  animistic  explanation  is  that  a  spirit  lodged 
in  these  objects  resents  the  act  as  a  personal  injury; 
and  a  step  further  on  the  object-spirit  may  be  suc¬ 
ceeded  by  a  god  to  whom  the  object  is  sacred.  When 
Uzzah  put  out  his  hand  to  steady  the  ark  of  the 
Lord  as  the  cart  threatened  to  upset,  he  dropped 
dead  in  his  tracks,  killed  by  a  shock  of  “holiness,” 
which  is  the  Hebrew  name  for  this  deadly  fluid.  So 
strong  is  the  belief  in  the  infallibly  fatal  consequences 
of  such  acts  that  in  well-attested  instances  sound 
and  strong  men  who  have  committed  them  in  com¬ 
plete  ignorance  have  lain  down  and  died  when  they 
learned  what  they  had  done — died  because  they 
knew  they  would ! 

Persons,  things,  or  acts  in  which  this  mysterious 
fatality  lurks  are  often  said  to  be  tabu,  a  Polynesian 
name  said  to  mean  “marked,”  but  now  generally 


MORALS  AND  RELIGION 


71 


used  in  the  sense  of  “ prohibited”  by  custom  or  re¬ 
ligion.  The  significance  of  tabu  lies,  however,  not 
in  the  prohibition,  which  is  social  and  secondary, 
but  in  the  nature  of  the  sanction,  the  inevitable, 
automatic,  and  incommensurate  consequence  of  vio¬ 
lation.  The  consequence,  moreover,  is  contagious; 
in  the  solidarity  of  primitive  society  the  act  of  an 
individual,  reckless  or  accidental,  may  involve  his 
family  or  the  whole  community  in  his  ruin.  To 
forestall  this  peril  the  community  often  purges  itself 
of  the  contagion  by  putting  to  death  the  perpetrator 
or  banishing  him,  in  one  way  or  the  other  repudiating 
all  connection  with  him  and  his  deed. 

The  notions  we  have  been  describing  are  not  moral; 
but  the  observance  of  the  interdictions  becomes  part 
of  the  mores  of  the  community,  and  is  enforced  with 
the  energy  of  self-preservation.  The  effectiveness 
of  its  double  sanction  leads  men  of  authority,  in  the 
common  interest,  or  for  the  special  benefit  of  chiefs 
or  priests,  to  extend  the  system  over  large  fields  in 
which  it  had  no  natural  basis.  In  Hawaii  this  had 
gone  to  such  intolerable  lengths  that  in  the  early 
years  of  the  nineteenth  century  the  whole  structure 
was  done  away. 

Neither  was  the  tabu  originally  religious;  but  the 
explanation  which  attributes  the  consequences  of 
violation  to  the  explosive  anger  of  spirits  or  gods, 


72  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


provoked  by  invasion  of  their  domain  or  by  acts 
abhorrent  to  them,  connects  it  with  religion,  where 
again  its  scope  is  widened  and  its  import  changed. 
Eventually  whatever  belongs  peculiarly  to  gods  or 
is  regarded  as  peculiarly  obnoxious  to  them  is  put 
under  this  sanction.  The  old  methods  of  physically 
removing  contagion  become  an  antidemonic  disin¬ 
fection,  and  finally  rites  of  expiation  and  placation 
addressed  to  the  gods.  The  idea  of  guilt  originates 
in  these  notions. 

Although  these  restraints  on  human  behavior  are 
not  intrinsically  moral,  many  things  that  were  early 
and  most  generally  interdicted  fall  in  the  sphere  of 
morals  in  our  use  of  the  word.  The  manslayer,  for 
example,  even  a  warrior  who  has  killed  an  enemy  in 
battle,  in  many  parts  of  the  world  requires  formal 
and  often  protracted  expiations  or  purifications 
before  he  can  resume  his  ordinary  place  in  society. 
Among  the  ancient  Greeks  a  man  wdio  had  acci¬ 
dentally  killed  another  had  to  leave  the  land  for  a 
period  and  seek  purification  from  a  stranger,  though 
he  was  not  regarded  as  guilty  of  homicide.  The 
nature  of  the  things  done  in  such  cases  showTs  that 
they  were  originally  means  of  removing  a  physical 
contagion.  Savages  often  give  the  animistic  expla¬ 
nation:  they  ward  off  or  placate  the  angry  ghosts 
of  the  slain.  The  murder  of  a  clansman,  on  the 


MORALS  AND  RELIGION 


73 


other  hand,  is  usually  inexpiable  in  any  such  way; 
it  demands  blood  vengeance. 

Marriage  or  extramarital  connection  between 
members  of  mutually  interdicted  groups — the  primi¬ 
tive  notion  of  incest — is  also  an  inexpiable  offense. 
The  community  may  avert  the  consequences  of 
tolerating  such  a  monstrous  violation  of  the  mores 
by  putting  both  parties  to  death.  Elsewhere  they 
are  left  to  reap  the  consequences  themselves.  In  the 
Hebrew  law,  while  the  adulteress  w'as  stoned  to  death 
by  the  whole  community,  no  legal  penalty  is  attached 
to  the  numerous  varieties  of  incest.  The  ominous 
sentence  is,  “That  person  will  be  cut  off  from  his 
people'’ — exterminated  by  the  act  of  God.  The 
impersonality  of  the  expression  suggests  a  survival 
of  the  primitive  conception  of  the  automatic  deadly 
effect  of  the  infringement  of  a  sex  tabu.  It  will  be 
found  in  fact  that  all  the  kerithoth  (thirty-six  are 
enumerated  in  the  Mishnah)  are  ancient  tabus,  with 
divine  vengeance  substituted  for  inherent  deadliness. 

It  is  perhaps  in  this  way  that  the  gods  become  the 
vindicators  of  certain  spheres  of  morals  in  distinction 
from  offenses  against  themselves,  or,  to  put  it  in  a 
different  way,  the  extra-social  sanction  of  these  parts 
of  the  mores  becomes  religious.  The  idea  of  con¬ 
tagious  or  hereditary  guilt  which  has  so  important 
a  place  in  religion  may  also  be  traced  to  the  circle 


74  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


of  tabu  notions.  I  need  only  recall  the  prominence 
of  this  motive  in  Greek  tragedy,  as  in  the  fate  of 
(Edipus,  or  the  doom  of  the  house  of  Atreus. 

For  the  further  development  it  was  of  great  con¬ 
sequence  that,  in  correspondence  with  the  political 
evolution  of  society,  as  was  remarked  in  the  pre¬ 
ceding  chapter,  the  gods  came  to  be  thought  of  as 
divine  rulers,  who,  like  human  rulers  in  this  stage 
of  civilization,  become  guardians  of  the  customary 
law  of  the  community  in  all  its  branches,  and  enforce 
it  upon  transgressors  with  something  of  the  public 
interest  that  distinguishes  punishment  from  ven¬ 
geance.  They  take  cognizance  particularly  of  mis¬ 
deeds  that  escape  detection  among  men  and  wrongs 
done  to  the  defenseless.  The  divine  retribution  does 
not  single  out  morals  in  our  sense  for  its  especial 
field,  but  the  new  sanction  it  gives  is  of  peculiar 
significance  in  this  sphere. 

As  rulers,  it  is  expected  of  the  gods,  as  of  earthly 
kings,  that  they  give  right  judgment  and  execute 
their  sentence  impartially.  Through  this  analogy 
arises  the  conviction  that  the  gods  must  be  just, 
which  in  time  makes  justice  belong  to  the  very  idea 
of  God.  A  good  king,  moreover,  is  one  who  not 
only  thus  administers  even-handed  justice,  but  who 
wisely  and  unselfishly  promotes  the  interests  of  his 


MORALS  AND  RELIGION 


75 


people,  and  this  ideal  also  transfers  itself  to  the  gods. 
A  divine  tyranny  becomes  as  inconceivable  as  human 
tyranny  is  intolerable.  But  this  belongs  to  another 
chapter. 

When  it  came  to  be  believed  that  the  gods  were 
not  merely  the  guardians  and  vindicators  of  the 
customary  law  of  the  community,  but  the  authors 
of  all  law,  social,  civil,  and  religious,  every  trans¬ 
gression  or  neglect  is  an  offense  against  God  in  the 
quality  of  lawgiver  as  well  as  ruler,  and  if  wilful  is 
a  constructive  defiance  of  his  authority  which  he 
doubly  resents.  It  is  through  this  immediate  reference 
to  God  that  wrong-doing  becomes  sin. 

That  in  this  way  morals  acquire  the  authority 
and  sanction  of  religion  is  of  the  highest  consequence, 
for  in  the  progress  of  civilization  the  original  authority 
and  sanction  are  dissolved.  They  depended,  as  we 
have  seen,  on  the  homogeneity  of  a  comparatively 
small  group,  with  simple  interests.  With  the  growth 
of  cities  and  nations  of  amalgamated  population  and 
complex  interests,  the  compulsive  force  of  commu¬ 
nity  opinion  relaxed.  Advance  in  knowledge  of  the 
world  and  the  workings  of  nature  undermined  many 
primitive  beliefs.  By  taking  morals  into  its  sphere 
and  making  them  part  of  a  divine  law ,  religion 
furnished  the  only  possible  substitute  for  the  sanc¬ 
tion  of  the  primitive  mores ;  a  substitute  effective  so 


76  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


long  as  the  authority  of  religion  itself  was  not 
challenged.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  religion,  with 
its  characteristic  conservatism,  gave  a  degree  of 
fixity  to  the  morals  as  well  as  the  rituals  of  the  past, 
the  unsorted  accumulation  of  ages.  What  we  regard 
as  moral  was  inextricably  entangled  with  non-moral 
interdictions.  Misfortune,  disease,  sin,  guilt,  punish¬ 
ment,  were  indiscriminate,  and  the  piacula  devised 
for  the  one  were  extended  to  the  other.  Religion  was 
not  made  ethical,  but  morality  religious;  and  religion 
thus  often  interposed  a  formidable  obstacle  to  moral 
progress.  This  is  peculiarly  the  case  where  the  law 
is  fixed  in  sacred  scriptures  containing  a  closed  can¬ 
on  of  revelation,  which  admits  no  addition  or  sub¬ 
traction,  no  change,  and  thus  gives  the  stamp  of 
finality  to  the  institutions,  laws,  and  moral  standards 
of  a  past  which  religion  is  thus  forbidden  to  out¬ 
grow. 


CHAPTER  V 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS 

As  we  have  seen  in  a  former  chapter,  polydemon¬ 
ism  and  polytheism  are  the  universal  forms  of  natural 
religion  when  it  has  reached  this  level.  Man’s  ex¬ 
perience  is  always  of  a  multiplicity  of  powers  that 
do  something  to  him  or  for  him,  whether  he  takes 
it  that  the  things  themselves  do  it,  or  spirits  in  the 
things,  or  demons  that  get  into  him.  His  multi¬ 
plying  wants  lead  to  a  multiplication  of  the  powers 
from  which  he  seeks  their  satisfaction,  and  those  on 
which  he  relies  for  his  greater  and  more  constant 
needs  outgrow  the  rest  and  become  gods,  without 
supplanting  their  humbler  colleagues  or  superseding 
the  more  primitive  demonism. 

At  an  early  stage  we  find  men  making  gods  of  the 
instruments  they  employ  to  supply  their  needs, 
implements  of  the  chase  and  weapons  of  war,  the 
tools  of  primitive  agriculture  or  the  apparatus  of 
primitive  arts.  Here,  as  in  so  many  other  cases,  an 
original  magical  efficacy  develops  into  religion.  A 
similar  process  may  be  assumed  when  the  apparatus 
of  worship  comes  to  be  itself  an  object  of  worship — 
cultus  gods,  such  as  Agni,  the  sacrificial  fire,  Soma, 

77 


78  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


the  libation,  in  India,  which  in  the  Rig  Veda  take 
rank  with  the  greatest  of  the  nature-gods. 

The  development  of  polytheism  does  not  proceed 
in  isolation,  and  consequently  polytheisms  are  gen¬ 
erally  composite.  Kindred  tribes  may  confederate 
or  combine  in  larger  groups  with  an  ensuing  in¬ 
clusive  association  of  their  gods  in  the  common  re¬ 
ligion  of  the  amalgamated  people;  neighboring  towns 
grow  together  into  a  city  with  similar  result;  the 
union  of  petty  states  in  a  kingdom  brings  their  gods 
into  a  comprehensive  national  pantheon;  the  con¬ 
sciousness  of  racial  unity  without  political  union 
may  accomplish  the  same  thing;  conquest  or  col¬ 
onization  not  only  plants  the  gods  of  the  conquerors 
in  new  regions,  but  often  incorporates  the  gods  of 
the  conquered  in  the  pantheon  of  the  conquerors, 
a  process  much  facilitated  by  the  identification  of 
the  alien  gods  with  those  of  the  newcomers.  The  re¬ 
ligion  of  the  Greeks  and  the  Romans  affords  familiar 
examples  of  all  these  phenomena  as  well  as  of  the 
introduction  of  strange  deities  by  the  ways  of  com¬ 
merce  and  of  the  deliberate  borrowing  of  gods  for 
particular  purposes  or  emergencies.  The  process 
went  on  on  a  vastly  enlarged  scale  through  the  whole 
extent  of  Alexander’s  empire  and  the  Macedonian 
kingdoms  that  succeeded  it,  and  in  the  Roman  world 
ended  in  a  universal  syncretism  of  gods  and  cults 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  79 


in  the  whole  Mediterranean  area,  which  was,  so  to 
speak,  the  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  polytheism,  and 
gave  an  effective  argument  to  the  philosophical  and 
religious  advocates  of  the  unity  of  the  godhead. 

Political  progress  reflects  itself  in  the  world  of  the 
gods.  The  tutelary  god  of  a  city  which  establishes 
its  dominion  over  other  territories,  or  the  national 
god  of  a  conquering  people,  often  becomes  the  god 
of  the  kingdom  or  eventually  of  an  empire,  as  is 
exemplified  in  Egypt,  where  Amon,  the  ram-god  of 
Thebes,  hyphenated  with  Ra,  the  solar  deity,  became 
the  god  of  the  Theban  empire,  in  whose  name  wars 
were  waged  and  to  whom  the  largest  share  of  the 
spoils  was  dedicated,  but  without  superseding  the 
other  gods  in  their  own  seats  or  reducing  them  at 
home  to  a  subordinate  rank.  On  the  other  hand, 
a  great  nature-god,  like  Tien  (Heaven)  in  China, 
may  be  the  “ Supreme  Emperor”  (Shang-ti)  by 
native  right,  and  be  correlated  in  the  state  religion 
to  the  human  emperor,  the  Son  of  Heaven. 

In  early  monarchies  the  king  was  commonly  the 
religious  as  well  as  the  civil  head  of  the  nation, 
exercising  in  person  on  great  occasions  priestly 
functions,  some  of  which  were  reserved  to  him 
alone,  while  others  were  deputed  by  him  to  the 
ordinary  ministers  of  the  cultus.  Conversely,  the 
sacerdotal  character  of  the  king  made  it  all  the 


80  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


more  natural  for  men  to  think  of  the  god  as  a 
divine  king. 

With  the  advance  of  civilization  and  the  accumu¬ 
lation  of  wealth,  the  cultus  became  more  elaborate 
and  more  magnificent;  the  gods  bestowed  larger 
gifts  on  their  people,  and  their  worshippers  recipro¬ 
cated  in  larger  gifts  to  the  gods.  Where  in  older 
times  the  place  of  worship  wras  a  sacred  precinct 
surrounding  the  altar  under  the  open  sky  or  a  sim¬ 
ple  fane,  temples  wore  now  reared,  palaces  for  the 
deity,  wrhich  from  age  to  age  became  greater  and 
more  splendid.  The  treasures  of  cities  and  empires 
wore  lavished  upon  them,  and  they  wore  built  and 
embellished  wdth  all  the  resources  of  art.  The  rude 
stone  or  post  in  wdiich  the  deity  wTas  present  to  re¬ 
ceive  the  homage  of  his  worshippers  wfas  succeeded 
by  an  image  of  the  god  in  the  likeness  of  man  or  beast 
or  the  two  together,  and  finally  among  some  peoples, 
an  art  w7as  created  wdiich  expressed  their  highest 
conceptions  of  divinity. 

Here,  however,  wride  diversities  appear  in  different 
religions.  What  has  been  said  applies  eminently 
to  Egypt,  Babylonia,  and  Greece.  In  China,  where 
the  great  powors  or  spirits  of  nature  are  worshipped 
in  their  proper  character  under  the  open  sky,  the 
state  religion  evolved  a  cultus  as  splendid  and  im¬ 
pressive  as  has  ever  been  seen,  without  temples  or 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  81 


images.  In  Yedic  India,  where  there  were  not  even 
permanently  sacred  precincts,  the  place  of  sacrifice 
being  marked  off  and  consecrated  for  the  occasion, 
no  temples  were  reared,  no  images  fashioned.  Jains 
and  Buddhists,  with  no  gods  to  begin  with,  created 
a  characteristic  religious  architecture  and  a  notable 
art  of  sculpture  in  monuments  of  their  founders,  and 
presently  in  temples  housing  multitudes  of  images, 
and  developed  a  stately  cultus,  normally  without 
animal  sacrifices.  The  modern  religions  of  India 
followed  with  innumerable  temples  and  hosts  of 
grotesque  idols. 

The  fundamental  elements  of  worship  continue  to 
be  offerings  and  prayer,  but  the  variety  and  magni¬ 
tude  of  the  offerings  increase  and  formulas  of  prayer 
for  different  occasions  and  circumstances  multiply. 
The  success  of  the  rite  depends  on  the  exactness  of 
the  performance  in  act  and  word,  which  becomes 
matter  of  expert  knowledge  and  professional  tra¬ 
dition.  The  priesthoods  often  grow  to  be  inordi¬ 
nately  numerous;  they  are  classified  by  their  special 
functions,  and  ranked  in  a  hierarchy.  In  some 
countries,  as  in  Egypt,  they  acquired  enormous 
corporate  wealth,  and  a  power  which  more  than 
once  proved  a  peril  or  a  disaster  to  the  state.  The 
Brahmans  in  India  attained  an  even  greater  power 
without  organization  and  without  material  means. 


82  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


In  China,  at  the  opposite  pole,  the  whole  public 
cultus  was  a  function  of  the  state,  and  was  per¬ 
formed  by  the  emperor,  by  vassal  princes  for  their 
territories,  or  by  the  viceroys,  governors,  and  other 
officials  in  their  several  ranks  as  part  of  their  gov¬ 
ernmental  duty.  The  necessary  expert  knowledge 
of  the  ritual  was  furnished  by  masters  of  ceremon¬ 
ies  who  were  learned  in  such  matters.  There  was 
no  professional  priesthood  at  all. 

In  Greece — to  illustrate  the  diversity  by  but  one 
other  example — the  priests  of  the  various  temples 
were  in  historical  times  often  chosen  from  the  citi¬ 
zen  body  by  lot  or  election,  for  life  or  a  term  of 
years.  While  in  service  they  were  subject  to  certain 
restrictions  and  observances,  but  they  had  no  intrin¬ 
sic  sacerdotal  character  and  formed  no  priestly 
class. 

This  accounts  for  the  fact  that  the  history  of  re¬ 
ligious  thought  and  philosophical  speculation  in 
Greece  are  so  completely  secular,  in  the  sharpest 
contrast  to  ancient  India.  And  indeed  hencefor¬ 
ward  the  character  and  influence  of  the  priesthood 
are  most  important  factors  in  the  development  and 
diversification  of  religions.  In  India  philosophical 
speculation  began  in  Brahman  circles,  though  even 
in  the  Upanishads  laymen  participate  in  it;  then 
came  an  anti-Brahmanic  movement,  best  repre- 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  83 


sented  for  us  in  Buddhism,  which  rejected  the  Vedas 
with  all  the  pretensions  of  the  priests,  seeking  other 
ways  of  salvation;  and  finally  the  modern  religions 
of  India,  non-Brahmanic  in  origin  however  largely 
Brahmanized  in  the  course  of  time.  In  Greece,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  was  from  the  first  the  poets  and 
philosophers  who  did  all  the  thinking  and  led  the 
way  to  higher  conceptions  of  the  godhead  and  what 
the  gods  require  of  men.  In  Israel,  again,  the  epoch- 
making  steps  of  progress  were  made  by  the  prophets 
and  in  later  times  by  the  scribes,  not  by  the  priest¬ 
hood  as  such. 

In  some  religions,  as  in  Greece,  enrichment  and 
aesthetic  refinement  of  the  cultus  are  carried  very 
far  without  radical  departure  from  the  older  model. 
The  softer  manners  of  civilization  lead  to  the  at¬ 
tenuation  of  many  savage  rites;  the  slaughter  of 
a  human  victim  in  sacrifice  or  expiation  may  be  re¬ 
duced  to  the  scratching  of  the  neck  with  the  priest’s 
knife  or  to  a  mere  gesture.  Processions  and  dances, 
mimes  and  plays  of  a  very  primitive  type  are  de¬ 
veloped  into  a  stately  ceremonial,  or  into  a  noble 
drama.  From  being  magical  means  to  work  nature 
or  the  spirits  in  nature,  they  came  to  be  spectacles 
well-pleasing  to  the  gods,  who,  being  the  ideal  of 
cultivated  Greeks,  were  gratified  by  the  things  in 
which  their  worshippers  delighted. 


84  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


The  older  notion  was  that  the  portion  of  the 
sacrifice  that  was  offered  to  the  gods  was  the  food 
of  the  gods.  For  chthonic  deities  it  was  buried,  or 
the  blood  was  poured  into  a  pit  in  the  earth;  for 
gods  of  rivers  or  of  the  sea,  it  was  committed  to  the 
waters.  Etherialized  by  burning  on  the  altar  it 
ascended  to  the  sky  in  a  savory  smoke,  which  the 
heavenly  gods  sniffed  with  satisfaction.  When  the 
gods  grew  greater,  and  came  to  be  thought  of  as 
the  bestowers  of  all  good  things  on  men,  the  reflec¬ 
tion  arose  that  they  can  be  in  no  need  of  the  paltry 
gifts  men  make  them  out  of  their  share  in  the  great 
gifts  of  the  gods,  and  sacrifice  and  offering  assumed 
for  such  thinkers  the  character  of  homage. 

In  human  society,  men  bring  a  present  to  a  king 
such  as  is  within  their  ability,  and  the  king,  though 
he  has  no  need  of  it,  accepts  it  as  a  token  of  the 
loyalty  and  good-will  of  the  giver.  So  it  is  with 
the  gods  also.  It  is  not  the  magnitude  and  costli¬ 
ness  of  the  offering  that  count,  but  the  spirit  in 
which  it  is  offered.  Where  the  conviction  is  reached 
that  the  gods  are  just,  and  demand  of  men  upright¬ 
ness  and  humanity  in  their  dealings  with  their  fellows, 
the  consequence  is  drawn  that  they  cannot  be  pro¬ 
pitiated  or  persuaded  to  condone  wrong-doing  by 
the  offerings  and  supplications  of  the  wrong-doer — 
to  imagine  that  they  can  is  to  impute  to  them  the 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  85 


character  of  bribable  judges.  The  efficacy  of  sacri¬ 
fice  is  thus  morally  conditioned. 

In  conflict  with  such  moralizing  of  the  cultus  is 
the  powerful  and  persistent  interest  of  the  offerer 
to  be  assured  of  the  efficacy  of  the  means  and  the 
certainty  of  the  result.  It  is  natural  also  that 
priests  should  believe  in  the  unconditional  potency 
of  the  propitiatory  sacrifices  and  expiations  wffiich 
they  make,  and  should  cultivate  this  confidence  in 
the  minds  of  their  clients.  Monstrous  misdeeds 
may  demand  extraordinary  expiations;  but  some¬ 
where  in  the  arsenal  of  piacula  there  must  be  remedial 
rites  adequate  to  the  worst  offenses.  Moreover, 
the  worst  offenses  in  the  religious  point  of  view 
were  not  what  we  call  moral,  but  acts  or  neglects 
which  affected  the  gods  directly  and  constituted 
religious  Icesa  maiestas,  while  wrongs  done  to  fellow 
men  interested  the  gods  only  indirectly  and  more 
remotely.  It  was  this  natural  logic  of  religion  that 
made  the  contradictory  doctrine  in  the  mouth  of 
the  Hebrew  prophets  sound  to  their  contemporaries 
not  only  absurd  but  godless,  and  it  may  be  doubted 
whether  the  teaching  of  Plato  had  greater  effect 
in  religion. 

The  most  outspoken  assertion  of  the  unconditional 
efficacy  of  ritual  is  in  India.  The  Brahman  priest 
by  the  ceremonies  he  performs  makes  the  gods  do 


86  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


what  the  worshipper  wants,  and  he  is  therefore  an 
earthly  god,  obviously  more  powerful  than  the  gods 
whom  he  constrains  to  do  his  will.  This  is  only 
the  extreme  consequence  of  the  interest  both  priest 
and  worshipper  have  in  guaranteeing  the  result. 

Apart  from  such  extravagant  valuation  of  the 
cultus,  the  perpetuation  of  the  ancient  forms  of 
expiation  of  itself  hindered  the  rational  and  moral 
progress  of  religion.  Originally  physical  means  of 
averting  by  their  own  operation  the  automatic  con¬ 
sequences  of  even  an  unwitting  intrusion  into  the 
sphere  of  the  ultradangerous,  and  in  the  animistic 
stage  antidemonic  rites  of  aversion  or  riddance, 
they  become  means  of  placating  offended  gods,  and 
however  they  may  be  assimilated  to  modes  of  wor¬ 
ship  and  incorporated  in  the  cultus,  they  are  never 
rid  of  their  primitive  magical  character. 

When  religion  has  reached  the  idea  of  sin  as  an 
offense  against  good  and  just  gods,  and  has  thus 
given  a  new  meaning  to  morality,  the  notion  that 
moral  guilt  can  be  nullified  by  physical  means  is  in 
conflict  with  all  higher  religious  conceptions.  Bolder 
thinkers  like  Heraclitus  poured  their  scorn  on  its 
absurdity;  more  conservative  souls  had  recourse  to 
symbolic  interpretation,  which  in  all  ages  is  the 
approved  method  of  reconciling  men  to  irrational 
and  immoral  survivals  in  a  religion  which  they  have 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  87 


outgrown.  But  for  the  masses  ritual  expiation  re¬ 
mained  the  easy  way  to  get  rid  of  the  consequences 
of  their  misdeeds  without  the  painful  necessity  of 
reforming  their  lives. 

Mythology,  which  in  earlier  times  did  much  to 
make  the  gods  completely  human  and  thus  put  them 
in  the  way  of  becoming  moral,  is  another  obstacle 
to  the  complete  moralizing  of  religion,  particularly 
where  it  is  part  of  an  authoritative  priestly  tradition, 
or,  as  in  Greece,  has  acquired  an  equivalent  authority 
through  the  poets.  Myths  in  which  operations  of 
nature  such  as  the  fertilization  of  the  earth  by  the 
sky  were  imagined  as  the  deeds  of  man-like  deities, 
become  recitals  of  divine  adulteries  and  incests, 
which  were  multiplied  by  poetic  imitations.  The 
genealogies  of  gods  and  heroes  abound  in  relations 
no  less  contrary  to  even  the  rudest  morals.  The 
cosmogonic  theogonies,  as  they  are  told  in  Hesiod 
and  after,  are  full  of  savage  crimes.  The  gods  of 
Homer  instigate  and  promote  deeds  such  as  men 
universally  condemn,  and  are  guilty  of  like  crimes 
themselves. 

When  men  got  to  the  point  of  conceiving  that 
the  gods  should  be  examples  of  human  virtues,  they 
found  them  in  the  mythical  theology  to  be  examples 
of  all  human  and  superhuman  vices.  And  the  worst 
was,  as  Plato  emphasizes,  that  the  education  of 


88  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


youth  was  based  on  the  poets,  and  their  minds  in 
their  most  absorbent  years  were  imbued  with  these 
examples,  made  the  more  harmful  by  the  charm  of 
noble  poetry,  the  prestige  of  venerable  antiquity,  and 
the  belief  in  poetic  inspiration.  It  is  no  wonder  that 
Greek  religion  was  attacked  from  this  side  in  the 
name  of  religion  and  morality  as  well  as  of  reason. 
Less  radical  minds,  conscious  of  the  incompatibility 
of  the  myths  with  the  very  idea  of  godhead,  found  a 
way  of  escape  from  the  dilemma  by  allegory,  as  they 
got  over  similar  difficulties  in  the  cultus  by  symbol¬ 
ism,  and  saved  themselves  from  the  necessity  of 
rejecting  either  the  myths  or  the  gods  by  discovering 
a  deeper  meaning  in  the  myths  that  was  not  only 
harmless  but  even  enlightening  and  edifying,  as  the 
fathers  of  the  Christian  church  subsequently  did 
with  the  Old  Testament.  But  however  satisfying 
these  circles  may  have  found  their  own  fictions, 
such  interpretations  did  not  do  much  to  counteract 
in  the  general  mind  the  harm  that  established  ritual 
and  accepted  mythology  wrought. 

We  have  seen  in  a  former  connection  how  the 
Shaman,  or  rather  the  spirit  he  conjures  into  himself, 
gives  answers  to  questions  about  all  sorts  of  things 
which  there  is  no  natural  means  of  knowing.  This 
is  perhaps  the  oldest  form  of  natural  divination  and 
the  origin  of  the  idea  of  revelation.  In  more  ad- 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  89 


vanced  religions  the  inquiries  are  addressed  to  gods, 
as  in  the  oracle  at  Delphi,  where  the  Pythia  went 
into  a  frenzy,  and  her  inarticulate  ravings,  inspired 
by  the  god,  were  interpreted  in  verse  by  the  prophet 
of  the  oracle.  Another  very  ancient  and  almost 
universal  mode  of  inquiry  of  the  gods  is  by  the  lot, 
which  sometimes  becomes  an  elaborate  technique. 
The  gods  also  of  their  own  motion  gave  signs  to  men, 
omens  and  portents,  which  were  interpreted  by  in¬ 
spired  seers  or  by  professional  experts. 

Another  widely  distributed  mode  of  divination 
was  the  inspection  of  the  inwards  of  sacrificial 
victims,  favorable  or  unfavorable  responses  being 
drawn  from  abnormal  appearances,  particularly  in 
the  liver.  Practised  to-day  by  wild  tribes  in  Borneo 
and  the  Philippines,  the  extispicia  were  developed 
into  a  complicated  procedure  by  a  branch  of  the 
Babylonian  priesthood,  and  spread  thence  to  Greece 
and  Italy.  Another  art,  in  which  also  the  Baby¬ 
lonians  had  the  pre-eminence,  was  the  observation 
of  the  positions  and  motions  of  the  heavenly  bodies, 
and  other  celestial  phenomena.  In  the  centuries 
before  the  Christian  era,  astrology  outranked  all 
other  forms  of  divination,  and  evolved  the  theory 
that  the  fortunes  of  men  were  not  only  written  in 
their  stars  but  unalterably  determined  by  their 
stars — an  astrological  fatalism  which  did  away  alto- 


90  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


gether  with  the  belief  in  divine  providence  and  hu¬ 
man  responsibility,  and  contributed  not  a  little  to 
the  decadence  of  religion. 

The  idea  of  divine  revelation  is  not  limited  to 
such  casual  and  piecemeal  disclosures.  In  India 
the  poets  (Rishis)  were  inspired  to  put  into  hymns 
the  praises  of  the  gods  for  occasions  of  sacrifice,  and 
these  utterances  were  preserved  and  eventually  col¬ 
lected  for  ritual  purposes  in  the  Rig  Veda.  Inspira¬ 
tion  was  not  confined,  however,  to  praises  and  prayers 
to  the  gods,  nor  did  it  cease  with  the  Vedic  age.  The 
rituals  of  the  Brahmanas,  the  speculations  of  the 
Upanishads,  the  rules  for  domestic  observance — in 
short,  the  whole  religious  literature  and  the  regu¬ 
lations  which  governed  all  human  life — were  divine 
revelation.  Long  preserved  by  guild  and  school 
tradition  with  many  precautions  against  change,  it 
was  ultimately  written  down,  though  even  then  the 
book  was  regarded  only  as  an  auxiliary  to  memory 
or  an  imperfect  surrogate  for  it. 

In  Israel  the  revelation  of  God  to  the  prophets 
became  the  type  of  divine  revelation,  and  ultimately 
the  whole  body  of  ritual  and  observance,  the  civil 
law,  and  the  moral  standards  and  ideals  of  the 
nation  were  believed  to  have  been  revealed  at  the 
beginning  of  the  nation’s  existence  through  the  great¬ 
est  of  the  prophets,  Moses.  The  time  came  when 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  91 


prophetic  inspiration  ceased,  but  in  its  sacred 
Scripture  and  the  concomitant  tradition — equally 
inspired  and  divinely  authoritative — the  Jews  had 
the  complete  and  final  revelation  of  God’s  character 
and  purpose,  and  his  will  for  man’s  whole  life. 

Most  of  the  religions  which  have  produced  a  corpus 
of  sacred  scriptures  belong,  however,  to  the  class 
of  soteric,  or  redemptive,  religions,  with  which  we 
shall  have  to  do  hereafter. 

Though  polytheism  is  the  normal  form  of  natural 
theism,  tendencies  toward  unification  appear  com¬ 
paratively  early,  and  in  the  higher  religions  develop 
in  various  forms.  It  is  not  uncommon  to  find  among 
peoples  far  down  in  the  scale  of  culture  the  recog¬ 
nition  of  a  god  of  a  different  kind  from  the  rest,  who 
is  sometimes  regarded  as  the  maker  of  everything. 
He  is  commonly  thought  to  be  up  in  the  sky,  from 
which  eminence  he  sees  all  that  goes  on  below,  and 
frequently  he  is  believed  to  disapprove  wrong-doing 
(departure  from  the  tribal  mores),  and  to  approve 
conformity  to  them  as  men  do.  It  has  been  held 
by  some  modern  writers  on  the  beginnings  of  religion 
that  such  “high  gods  of  low  races”  represent  a  stage 
more  primitive  than  the  throngs  of  spirits,  bad  and 
good,  with  which  the  animistic  savage  peoples  his 
world,  and  the  many  gods  that  succeed  them — poly- 


92  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


theism  arises  from  an  earlier  and  purer  kind  of  re¬ 
ligion  by  a  degenerative  process.  Deterioration  is 
observable  in  the  history  of  religion  as  well  as  prog¬ 
ress,  but  in  this  instance  it  does  not  appear  that 
these  superior  gods  are  believed  to  intervene  in 
sublunary  affairs;  they  are  said  to  disapprove  wrong¬ 
doing,  but  they  do  nothing  to  make  their  disapproval 
felt,  and  men  correspondingly  do  nothing  to  depre¬ 
cate  their  displeasure  or  solicit  favor.  That  is,  they 
are  not  gods  in  religion  at  all,  and  there  is  no  evi¬ 
dence  that  they  ever  wTere  more  than  they  are  now. 
It  is  not  difficult  to  explain  the  origin  of  such  concep¬ 
tions  without  the  hypothesis  of  a  primitive  natural 
monotheism;  but  with  that  question  we  are  not 
further  concerned. 

Others  find  a  precursor  of  monotheism  in  what 
is  called  henotheism,  or  more  properly  katheno- 
theism.  In  Vedic  hymns,  for  example,  it  is  not 
uncommon  to  find  the  powers  and  attributes  of  all 
the  gods  ascribed  to  the  one  to  whom  the  hymn  is 
addressed.  This  is  primarily  a  liturgical  phenom¬ 
enon;  the  god  of  wdiom  something  is  wanted  is 
always  made  propitious  by  laudation  of  his  power 
and  generosity,  in  this  case  by  attributing  to  him 
the  ability  to  do  everything  that  the  whole  pantheon 
could  do.  On  the  next  occasion  any  other  god  may 
be  extolled  in  the  same  fashion.  This  habit  may 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  93 


have  contributed  at  a  later  stage  to  the  pantheism 
which  absorbs  all  the  gods  in  one,  or  in  some  par¬ 
ticular  one,  a  process  which  is  the  dissolution  of 
polytheism,  not  the  emergence  of  monotheism. 
Historically,  kathenotheism  has  never  shown  any 
tendency  in  that  direction,  nor  has  the  species  of 
pantheism  we  have  referred  to. 

In  Homer,  Zeus  is  king  of  gods  and  men.  This 
epic  monarchy  is,  however,  far  from  absolute,  and 
in  the  actual  religions  of  the  Greek  cities  it  was  little 
more  than  nominal.  In  Pindar,  and  above  all  in 
iEschylus,  the  conception  of  the  unity  of  the  moral 
order  of  the  world,  in  theological  phrase  the  unity 
of  the  moral  government  of  the  world,  leads  to  the 
exaltation  of  Zeus  to  a  supremacy  of  kind  rather 
than  merely  of  degree;  in  him  is  the  fulness  of  the 
godhead — Zeus  is  God.  These  pious  poets,  however, 
had  no  thought  of  combating  the  religion  of  the 
many  gods,  nor  of  reforming  it;  and  in  fact  made 
no  impression  upon  it.  Their  verses  were  quoted 
in  later  times  by  Jews  and  Christians  as  utterances 
of  prophets  of  a  monotheism  like  their  own;  but 
such  was  not  their  meaning  nor  effect. 

In  China  the  unity  of  the  moral  order  is  personal¬ 
ized  in  Tien,  Heaven,  as  Supreme  Ruler,  under 
whom  the  hierarchy  of  nature  powers,  conceived  as 
spirits,  fulfil  their  several  functions;  but  here  again 


94  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


no  further  progress  toward  monotheism  in  the  exclu¬ 
sive  sense  was  made. 

Philosophy  attained  the  idea  of  physical  unity 
through  reflection  on  the  unity  of  nature,  or  of 
ontological  unity  by  the  idea  of  the  necessary  unity 
of  Being,  and  in  either  case  the  One  may  be  called 
God;  but  while  thinkers  created  a  philosophy  which 
was  for  them  a  religion  or  a  substitute  for  religion, 
their  speculations  had  no  effect  on  the  accepted  re¬ 
ligions  except  to  detach  the  intellectual  classes  from 
them,  a  point  to  which  we  shall  have  occasion  to  recur 
farther  on.  The  essentially  monotheistic  religions, 
Judaism,  Christianity,  and  Islam,  had  a  historical 
origin  different  from  all  these  tendencies  to  unifi¬ 
cation  in  polytheism. 

Advancing  civilization  does  much  to  civilize  re¬ 
ligion.  The  cultus  is  enriched  and  aesthetically 
refined;  inhuman  rites  are  made  harmless  or  are 
symbolized ;  immoral  myths  are  ignored,  or  replaced 
by  inoffensive  versions,  or  allegorized  away;  loftier 
and  purer  ideas  of  the  gods  and  their  relations  to 
men  are  entertained.  But  civilization,  which  in 
the  ancient  world  was  an  affair  of  small  superior 
classes,  may  go  too  far  or  too  fast  in  its  improve¬ 
ments  for  the  masses,  and,  sometimes  in  conjunction 
wTith  shifting  of  population,  there  may  be  a  revival 
of  little  gods  in  whose  presence  the  small  man  feels 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  95 


more  at  home  and  of  rude  rites  such  as  he  is  ac¬ 
customed  to,  or  to  similar  appropriation  from  abroad. 

The  progress  of  civilization  is  intimately  connected 
with  man’s  enlarging  knowledge  of  the  world  and  of 
himself.  Experience  and  inquiry  showed  that  many 
of  the  things  the  forefathers  believed  were  not  so, 
and  that  their  explanations  were  childish.  Religion, 
on  its  animistic  assumptions,  accounted  for  every¬ 
thing  that  was  and  happened  in  the  world  by  the 
doings  of  voluntary  agents,  whom  it  imagined  ac¬ 
cording  to  the  need  of  the  case  or  the  vagaries  of 
mythopoetic  fancy.  When  men  advanced  from  the 
naive  question  “Who  did  it?”  to  inquiry  into  the 
fact  and  the  cause,  mythical  answers  were  excluded 
as  such,  and  in  so  far  as  religion  lent  its  authority 
to  mythology,  the  rejection  of  the  myths  involved 
disbelief  in  religion.  This  chapter  lies  most  clearly 
before  us  in  the  history  of  Greek  thought,  but  paral¬ 
lels  to  the  outcome  are  found  in  India  and  in  China. 

Philosophy,  which  long  comprehended  what  we 
call  science,  boldly  began  with  the  problem  of  the 
origin  and  constitution  of  the  universe,  and  essayed 
to  solve  it  without  bringing  in  gods  to  help;  so  far 
as  it  concerned  itself  with  them  at  all,  gods,  as  part 
of  the  cosmic  order,  were  themselves  to  be  accounted 
for.  The  Ionian  naturalists  and  their  successors 


96  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


sought  a  primordial  matter,  or  world  stuff,  by  trans¬ 
formations  of  which,  through  the  'working  of  its  own 
immanent  energy,  in  conformity  with  processes  of 
change  observable  in  the  nature  around  us,  the 
world  in  all  its  variety,  and  everything  that  comes 
about  in  it  might  be  causally  explained.  The  in¬ 
sufficiency  of  the  solutions  they  proposed  should 
not  be  permitted  to  obscure  the  fact  that  Thales 
and  those  who  came  after  him  conceived  the  problem 
of  the  universe  in  a  genuinely  scientific  way. 

Most  of  the  early  philosophers  seem  to  have  gone 
their  way  in  complete  indifference  to  religion  or  the 
consequences  of  their  theories  for  religion.  Xenoph¬ 
anes,  however,  assailed  with  trenchant  satire  not 
only  the  immorality  of  the  gods  in  Homer  and 
Hesiod  but  all  anthropomorphic  notions  of  the  gods, 
while  Heraclitus  railed  at  the  senseless  and  scanda¬ 
lous  rites  of  the  popular  religions.  Leucippus  and 
Democritus  in  their  atomic  theory  developed  a 
mechanical  materialism  akin  to  that  of  the  Indian 
Carvakas,  which  logically  left  no  more  place  for 
soul  than  for  god,  and  in  both  cases  the  inference 
that  the  pleasure  of  the  senses  is  the  only  good  wTas 
promptly  and  boldly  drawn. 

Anaxagoras  shocked  the  Athenians  by  teaching 
that  the  sun  was  a  white  hot  mass  of  rock  larger 
than  the  Peloponnesus,  and  the  moon  a  cold  rock 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  97 


of  smaller  dimensions.  He  was  banished  and  his 
books  burned  for  his  atheistic  astrophysics;  but  the 
younger  generation,  imbued  with  the  rationalism  of 
the  sophists,  rejected  the  prescriptive  authority  of 
religion  as  well  as  of  morality.  The  only  rule  of 
opinion  and  conduct  was  what  seemed  to  the  indi¬ 
vidual  reasonable.  The  agnostic  said  that  no  one 
could  know  whether  there  were  any  gods  or  not, 
still  less  what  they  were;  others  asked  how  men 
ever  came  to  imagine  or  invent  them.  In  the  field 
of  ethics  they  wanted  to  know  why  the  customs  of 
their  unenlightened  forefathers  or  their  notions  of 
right  and  wrong  should  govern  the  conduct  of  men 
of  modern  education.  And  what  right  has  the  ma¬ 
jority  to  impose  on  the  individual  by  law  or  the 
tyranny  of  public  opinion  a  rule  which  seems  to 
him  unreasonable  and  against  his  interest? 

This  ebullition  of  adolescent  free-thinking  was 
brief  and  limited,  but  the  questions  it  raised  in 
sceptical  or  negative  spirit,  together  with  those 
which  came  from  the  side  of  nascent  science  and 
speculation,  became  the  problems  of  more  serious 
philosophy.  Gods  made  in  the  likeness  of  men, 
even  though  magnified  to  immensity,  could  meet 
the  demands  neither  of  a  scientific  theory  of  the 
physical  universe  nor  of  metaphysical  theories  of 
being  and  becoming;  and  the  mos  maiorum  with 


98  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


the  sanction  of  religion  could  no  longer  be  the  norm 
of  morals. 

The  philosophers,  Plato  and  Aristotle  on  the  one 
hand  and  the  Stoics  on  the  other,  endeavored  to 
make  religion  rational  and  ethics  scientific.  The¬ 
ology  became  the  doctrine  of  a  transcendent  Deity 
with  the  former,  of  an  immanent  divine  Reason  with 
the  latter,  and  in  the  one  form  or  the  other  thence¬ 
forth  shaped  the  religious  thought  and  life  of  the  in¬ 
tellectual  classes,  or,  to  be  more  exact,  was  their  real 
religion  so  far  as  they  had  any,  whatever  piety  they 
showed  toward  the  ancestral  religions.  The  great 
mass  of  the  people  went  on  undisturbed  by  any 
movements  of  thought;  the  religion  of  their  fathers 
■was  good  enough  for  them.  Its  subsequent  history 
is  chiefly  external,  the  influx  of  foreign  gods  and 
cults  and  of  barbarous  mysteries,  and  finally  of 
general  syncretism — a  history  of  deterioration  rather 
than  progress. 

In  India  also  thought  outgrew  the  old  gods  and 
their  worship,  but  inasmuch  as  the  thinking  was 
chiefly  done  in  the  Brahman  caste  and  was  from  the 
beginning  metaphysical  rather  than  physical,  the 
outcome  wTas  different  from  that  among  the  Greeks. 
The  idea  of  unity  wTas  indeed  approached  from  the 
cosmological  side,  most  frequently  a  deity  who 
evolved  a  universe  out  of  himself;  but  this  was 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  99 


succeeded  by  an  ontological  conception  the  logical 
issue  of  which  was  an  idealistic  monism.  The 
Upanishads  add  the  great  idea  of  identity.  The 
real  self  of  man,  mistakenly  imagined  to  be  indi¬ 
vidual,  is  identical  with  the  All-Self,  and  the  end 
of  man’s  being  is  to  realize  this  identity.  This 
supernatural  end  leaves  all  natural  ends  behind, 
and  with  them  the  gods  who  minister  to  man’s 
natural  needs.  It  is,  however,  superimposed  upon 
natural  religion,  not  set  in  opposition  to  it.  In  the 
scheme  of  life  with  its  four  stages,  the  student  and 
the  householder  learn  the  Veda,  and  fulfil  the  duties 
and  practise  the  rites  of  the  ancient  religion;  in  the 
third  period  the  actual  observance  falls  away,  and 
the  man  occupies  himself  with  reflection  on  the 
deeper,  mystical  meaning  of  the  rites;  finally  this 
also  is  left  behind  for  meditation  on  the  relation  of 
the  soul  to  the  universe  and  the  attainment  of 
the  sublime  goal. 

Such  was  the  orthodox  way.  In  contradiction 
to  it  were  not  onlv  the  atheistic  atomism  of  the 
Carvakas,  but  the  numerous  sects  such  as  the  Bud- 
hists,  who  denied  the  authority  of  the  Vedas  and  the 
Brahman  priests.  If  they  did  not  deny  the  popular 
gods  also,  they  paid  them  no  worship  and  acknowl¬ 
edged  no  Lord — no  supreme  God  over  them.  Of 
this  movement,  the  effect  of  which  on  religion  in 


100  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


India  outlasted  the  sects  themselves,  there  will  be 
more  to  say  farther  on.  Here  it  is  enough  to  remark 
that  when  the  tide  ebbed,  the  ancient  Brahmanic 
religion  did  not  regain  its  pristine  supremacy.  For 
all  the  reverence  and  the  authority  accorded  to  it, 
the  religions  we  cover  with  the  name  Hinduism  had 
the  future;  religions  of  ruder  origin,  which  found 
the  way  to  combine  natural  and  supernatural  ends, 
good  things  in  this  life  and  better  things  beyond,  as 
the  gift  of  their  gods  Vishnu  and  Shiva,  while 
Brahmanism  lives  on  beside  them  chiefly  in  the 
Brahman  caste,  and  for  them  also  beside  rather 
than  instead  of  one  of  the  Hindu  religions.  Thus 
in  India  also  the  progress  of  thought  transcended 
the  ancient  religion,  and  did  not  succeed  in  carrying 
it  on  with  itself. 

In  the  field  of  morals  the  effect  is  less  marked: 
the  fundamental  precepts  of  the  religions  and  sects 
of  India  are  substantially  the  same,  whatever  differ¬ 
ences  there  may  be  in  principles  and  motives.  The 
form  has  always  remained  preceptive;  ethics  as  a 
science  of  conduct  apart  from  religious  sanctions 
has  no  place  in  the  voluminous  Indian  literature. 

These  instances  illustrate  in  different  ways  the 
reciprocal  relations  between  religion  and  culture. 
They  show  how  knowledge  and  thought  may  outrun 
religion,  which  then,  as  by  an  instinct  of  self-preser- 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  101 


vation,  becomes  a  retarding  or  even  a  reactionary 
force.  The  intellectually  and  morally  progressive 
elements  in  society  may  go  so  fast  and  so  far  as  to 
lose  touch  with  the  masses,  and  instead  of  doing 
their  part  to  elevate  them,  leave  them  to  their  in¬ 
corrigible  superstitions.  Moreover  the  development 
of  civilization  itself  is  not  a  continuous  forward 
movement;  the  retrogradations  are  as  conspicuous 
in  history  as  the  advances,  and  sooner  or  later  every 
civilization  in  the  past  has  become  decadent  and 
ceased  to  be,  carrying  down  with  it  the  religion 
which  was  impotent  to  check  the  decline  and  fall. 

I  have  endeavored  thus  far  to  indicate  what  seem 
to  me  to  be  the  primary  and  most  potent  factors 
in  the  origin  and  growth  of  religion.  It  would  be 
a  serious  mistake,  however,  to  suppose  that  they  were 
the  only  factors.  However  erroneous  we  may  think 
it  to  ascribe  the  origin  of  religion  to  the  awe  inspired 
in  early  men  by  the  majestic  march  of  the  heavenly 
bodies,  the  imposing  order  of  their  movements,  or 
to  the  aesthetic  impression  of  nature  in  any  form,  we 
have  no  reason  to  think  that  our  remote  forefathers 
were  altogether  insensible  to  impressions  to  which 
many  children  nowadays  spontaneously  respond.  It 
was  not  solely  because  of  their  utility,  nor  solely 
through  the  fear  inspired  by  thunder  and  lightning, 
that  the  sun  and  the  moon,  that  cloud  and  storm  and 


102  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


torrential  rain,  became  the  great  gods  of  our  Aryan 
ancestors  as  they  are  conceived  in  the  Rig  Veda. 
If  men  sought  to  placate  or  propitiate  these  powers 
out  of  a  motive  of  self-preservation,  the  attendant 
emotions  of  the  worshippers  must  have  been  at  least 
in  a  measure  due  to  the  awe-inspiring  impression  of 
their  operations  in  nature.  In  other  words,  aesthetic 
impressions  and  the  emotions  they  arouse  are  not  in 
themselves  religious,  but  they  become  so  by  reference 
to  the  gods  who  manifest  their  power  in  nature.  The 
same  thing  is  true  of  the  impression  produced  by  the 
softer  aspects  of  nature,  by  the  beauty  of  its  fair 
frame.  The  degree  in  which  the  majesty  and  beauty 
of  nature  affect  the  feeling  and  thought  of  men  differs 
very  widely  among  different  races  in  accordance  with 
their  environment  and  racial  temperament  or  en¬ 
dowment. 

Art  has  been  from  very  early  stages  a  companion 
to  religion.  It  is  possible  that  the  oldest  delineation 
of  animal  forms  had  a  utilitarian  motive  and  that 
what  we  should  call  a  magical  efficacy  was  attributed 
to  them.  But  in  the  higher  stages  of  religion  art 
is  taken  into  its  service.  Architecture  seems  every¬ 
where  to  have  had  its  first  great  development  in 
the  building  of  temples,  houses  for  the  gods,  and  in 
tombs  for  the  eternal  abode  of  the  great  of  the  earth. 
In  Egypt,  where  there  are  no  remains  of  the  palaces 


RELIGIONS  OF  HIGHER  CIVILIZATIONS  103 


of  kings,  temples  succeeded  one  another  on  the  same 
sites  with  increasing  magnificence  from  age  to  age. 
The  temples  of  Greece  are  among  the  greatest 
achievements  of  Greek  genius,  and  down  to  com¬ 
paratively  recent  times  temples  and  churches  and 
mosques  have  been  the  summit  of  architectural  art. 
One  who  to-day,  a  stranger  to  the  religion  which 
created  them  and  which  they  express,  stands  before 
the  long-deserted  temples  in  the  solitude  of  Psestum 
and  experiences  the  elevation  of  spirit  which  they 
inspire,  can  in  some  faint  degree  imagine  their  ef¬ 
fect  upon  the  devout  worshippers  to  whom  they 
meant  not  only  art  and  history  but  religion. 

The  first  rude  idols  w^ere  succeeded  by  represen¬ 
tations  of  the  gods  according  to  the  conception  of 
the  religion.  In  Greece  the  gods  are  in  form  and 
feature  the  idealized  perfection  of  humanity.  By 
the  side  of  the  works  of  the  Greek  sculptors  the 
images  of  the  Hindu  gods — a  relatively  late  develop¬ 
ment  in  the  Indian  religion — with  their  multiple 
faces,  arms,  and  legs,  strike  us  as  grotesque.  It  is, 
however,  the  grotesqueness  of  symbolic  art,  the 
effort  to  represent  the  god  as  more  than  human, 
seeing  all  things  and  reaching  everywhere  by  his 
power.  Religion  gives  to  art  its  conceptions  and 
ideals,  but  art  repays  its  borrowing  with  interest.  It 
was  not  a  mere  phrase  when  it  was  said  of  the  Zeus 


104  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


of  Phidias  at  Olympia,  that  it  seemed  to  add  some¬ 
thing  to  the  received  religion. 

Music  is  another  art  which  has  throughout  been  in¬ 
timately  associated  with  religion,  and  some  of  whose 
greatest  works  have  been  inspired  by  it,  while,  on  the 
other  hand,  no  other  art  has  perhaps  contributed 
so  much  to  arouse  religious  emotion  in  the  worship¬ 
pers.  The  drama,  as  a  representation  of  myth,  is 
also  probably  everywhere  in  the  beginning  a  religious 
art,  and  in  Greece  the  highest  religious  ideas  find 
their  expression  in  the  tragedies  of  iEschylus  and 
Sophocles. 


CHAPTER  VI 


AFTER  DEATH 

In  a  former  chapter  it  was  shown  how  the  belief 
arose  that  the  soul,  the  life  and  self  of  a  man,  in  the 
form  of  a  wraith,  survives  the  body  which  it  leaves 
at  death.  The  oldest  notion  probably  was  that  it 
lingered  in  the  neighborhood  of  its  untenanted  body 
and  the  scenes  of  its  former  life.  Sometimes  it  was 
imagined  that  it  might  suffer  by  the  destruction  of 
the  body,  or  might  still  need  the  body,  which  it  in¬ 
habited  as  a  kind  of  shell  though  it  no  longer  ani¬ 
mated  it.  Pains  were  then  taken  to  preserve  the 
body  by  natural  or  artificial  means.  In  Egypt,  to 

make  doublv  sure  that  the  soul  was  not  left  houseless 
%/ 

by  the  destruction  of  the  mummy,  portrait  statues 
were  installed  in  the  tomb.  This  belief  is,  however, 
not  universal,  and  the  disposition  of  the  body  differs 
widely  in  different  regions  and  times.  It  may  be 
left  on  a  raised  platform  out  of  the  reach  of  wild 
beasts,  buried  in  the  earth  with  a  heap  of  stones 
over  it  for  protection,  deposited  in  a  natural  cave 
or  an  excavation  in  the  rock,  or  it  may  be  consumed 
by  fire.  These  various  modes  are  frequently  asso¬ 
ciated  with  different  notions  about  the  abodes  of  the 

dead,  which  are  probably  in  most  cases  secondary. 

105 


106  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


The  existence  of  the  disembodied  soul  could  only 
be  imagined  as  a  ghostly  continuation  of  the  earthly 
life,  for  which  it  was  accordingly  furnished  with 
weapons,  utensils,  and  ornaments,  as  well  as  wdth 
supplies  of  food  and  drink.  This  custom  and,  by  in¬ 
ference,  the  beliefs  which  originate  it  are  of  extreme 
antiquity,  going  back  in  Europe  at  least  to  the  age 
of  the  Cromagnon  race,  and  long  antedating  any 
certain  evidence  of  religious  or  magical  rites  and 
notions.  In  settled  communities,  and  even  among 
nomads  whose  range  brings  them  annually  over  the 
same  circumscribed  area,  the  provision  of  food  and 
drink  is  commonly  renewed  from  time  to  time,  often 
at  stated  intervals.  With  the  advance  of  civilization 
tombs  are  built  for  the  great  of  the  earth,  to  be  the 
“ eternal  houses”  of  the  living  dead,  as  in  Egypt  and 
China  or  in  the  field  of  the  rEgean  culture,  and 
equipped  with  furniture,  gold  and  silver  and  pre¬ 
cious  stones,  costly  fabrics,  and  every  article  of  use 
and  luxury  befitting  the  estate  of  the  occupants. 

Wives  and  servants  w^ere  entombed  with  their 
masters  to  minister  to  them  in  the  other  life.  In 
some  recently  opened  tombs  in  Nubia  a  whole  retinue 
of  officials  with  their  families — hundreds  in  all — 
had  been  walled  up  in  a  corridor  of  the  tomb  where 
they  died  of  suffocation.  The  whole  court  accom¬ 
panied  their  lord  to  his  post  in  the  other  world,  to 


AFTER  DEATH 


107 


resume  their  station  and  functions  there,  just  as 
they  might  have  attended  him  if  transferred  to 
another  province  in  this  world.  In  Dahomey,  until 
European  rule  made  an  end  of  it  in  the  last  century, 
a  somewhat  similar  custom  existed.  At  the  death 
of  a  king  hundreds  of  men  and  women,  chiefly  pris¬ 
oners  of  war,  were  killed  at  his  grave  to  furnish  him 
with  wives  and  servants  in  the  spirit  world,  and  the 
contingent  was  annually  supplemented.  On  a  small¬ 
er  scale  the  same  custom  is  found  in  many  lands. 
In  most  civilized  countries,  however,  these  bloody 
ceremonies  are  superseded  by  the  deposit  in  the 
tomb  of  substitutes — images  of  wives  and  slaves. 
It  is  a  mistake  to  call  such  killings  “human  sacrifice”; 
it  does  not  appear  that  they  have  any  religious 
motive  or  association.  Nor  has  the  related  custom 
of  killing  men  or  animals  to  carry  messages  to  the 
other  world.  The  slaughter  of  enemies  at  the  funeral 
of  a  chief  or  warrior,  as  at  the  tomb  of  Patroclus, 
is  of  still  another  kind,  an  appeasal  by  vengeance. 

The  periodical  repetition  of  the  deposit  of  food 
and  drink  at  the  tomb  or  elsewhere  is  in  origin 
nothing  but  a  pious  provision  for  the  wants  of  the 
deceased,  prompted  by  the  same  motive  that  leads 
to  similar  care  for  the  wants  of  living  kinsmen,  and 
this  filial  piety  is  among  some  peoples  the  main 
motive  discoverable  in  the  subsequent  history  of 


108  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


the  custom.  It  is  doubtless  always  accompanied 
by  an  apprehension  that  the  spirits,  if  neglected, 
may  do  harm  to  those  who  undutifully  neglect 
them,  and  this  motive  sometimes  appears  to  be 
dominant;  but  this  gives  no  reason  for  assuming 
that  fear  of  ghosts  is  everywhere  the  sole  origin  of 
the  tendance  of  the  family  dead,  who  are  normally 
thought  of  as  friendly.  It  is  a  dire  misfortune  for 
a  man  to  have  no  descendants  to  do  him  this  service 
when  he  is  dead,  and  often  the  community  unites 
to  provide  at  regular  times  for  the  whole  multitude 
of  spirits  who  have  none  to  care  for  them  individu¬ 
ally.  Here  undoubtedly  the  apprehension  of  harm 
is  more  prominent  than  affection  for  the  unknown 
dead;  and  the  rite  assumes  the  character  of  riddance 
by  placation.  Besides  gifts  of  food,  other  things 
may  be  done  to  gratify  or  appease  the  spirits  of  the 
dead,  such  as  funeral  games  at  the  tombs  of  heroes. 

All  these  things  are  frequently  put  under  one  head, 
and  called  offerings  to  the  dead,  the  cult  of  the 
dead,  the  religion  of  the  dead,  and  it  is  believed  by 
some  that  this  is  the  root  of  all  religion.  It  is  im¬ 
portant  to  discriminate  between  a  tendance  of  the 
dead  which  appears  to  be  solely  for  their  sake — 
however  attended  by  apprehension  of  what  they 
might  do  if  neglected — and  a  tendance  in  which  to 
this  is  added  the  interest  of  the  living.  This  dis- 


AFTER  DEATH 


109 


tinction  is  best  illustrated  by  the  difference  between 
what  is  called  the  religion  of  the  dead  in  ancient 
Egypt  and  ancestor  worship  in  China. 

In  no  other  parts  of  the  world  have  these  things 
been  so  immensely  developed,  and  at  a  superficial 
glance  the  phenomena  seem  to  be  the  same.  But 
in  Egypt  the  offerings  are  not  accompanied  by  vener¬ 
ation  or  petitions — the  texts  on  the  tables  of  offering 
are  magical  formulas  to  convey  the  gifts  to  the  dead 
in  the  other  world — nor,  so  far  as  appears,  by  the 
expectation  that  the  dead  will  do  anything  for  the 
living  in  return.  In  China,  on  the  contrary,  the 
filial  descendants  venerate  their  ancestors,  acquaint 
them  with  their  plans  and  wishes,  beseech  their 
favor,  and  seek  their  benevolent  interest  and  as¬ 
sistance.  They  are  powers  for  whom  men  not  only 
do  something,  but  from  whom  they  look  to  get 
something.  In  other  words,  ancestor  worship  in 
China  has  the  marks  of  religion,  in  the  ordinary 
meaning  of  the  word;  in  Egypt  the  tendance  of 
the  dead  has  not. 

Food  and  drink  are  also  one  of  the  earliest  and 
most  universal  kinds  of  offering  made  to  other  than 
human  spirits,  from  the  fetish  up  to  the  great  gods. 
But  here  again  it  is  an  overhasty  inference  that 
all  such  offerings  originated  by  extension  of  offerings 
to  the  dead.  They  are  sufficiently  explained  by  the 


110  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


fact  that  men  inevitably  imagine  all  spirits  as  like 
themselves,  having  the  same  desires  and  pleased  by 
the  same  things.  The  similarity  of  the  customs, 
however,  would  naturally  tend  to  a  further  assimi¬ 
lation  of  conceptions  between  disembodied  human 
spirits  and  spirits  recognized  in  phenomena  of  na¬ 
ture  or  other  activities  in  the  savage’s  world,  where 
no  difference  of  kind  is  recognized  between  the  two. 
The  souls  of  dead  men  contribute  their  full  share  to 
the  hosts  of  mischievous  demons.  A  man  who  was 
a  terror  in  his  lifetime  for  violence  or  for  witchcraft 
is  all  the  more  terrible  when  he  becomes  an  invisi¬ 
ble  malicious  spirit  whose  proximity  is  evident  only 
when  the  mischief  is  done,  and  who  is  harder  to 
drive  away  by  aversive  magic  or  to  placate  by  gifts 
than  the  living  man.  On  the  other  hand,  the  souls 
of  valiant  chiefs  and  of  famous  Shamans,  expert 
practitioners  of  beneficent  magic,  become  champions 
and  defenders  of  their  fellows. 

The  clan  gods,  who  play  an  important  part  in 
certain  stages  of  religion,  were  often  in  fact  clan 
heroes  of  nearer  or  remoter  times,  or  were  believed 
to  have  been  such.  Imagination  pictures  them  in 
the  same  character  and  activities  in  which  they  lived 
among  men,  and  that  not  in  the  ghost  world  but 
in  this,  leading  their  clansmen  in  the  fight  or  the 
foray,  sometimes  even  seen  by  friends  or  foes  at  the 


AFTER  DEATH 


111 


head  of  the  host,  or  giving  wise  counsels  through  the 
oracle.  Even  in  more  advanced  religions  great  war- 
gods  may  be  eminent  generals  of  former  times,  and 
inventors  of  the  arts  of  civilization  are  deified,  or 
the  gods  of  those  arts  are  identified  with  legendary 
inventors,  as  in  China.  Not  only  do  human  spirits 
thus  become  gods,  but  conversely,  gods  of  other 
origin  may  come  to  be  believed  to  have  once  been 
men,  as  is  generally  thought  to  be  the  case  with 
some  of  the  Greek  heroes,  by  a  kind  of  deminutio 
capitis. 

Frequently  the  souls  are  imagined  to  go  to  some 
gathering  place  of  all  the  dead  (at  least  of  their  owTn 
people),  remote  from  the  haunts  of  men,  in  some 
distant  region  of  the  earth,  on  the  other  side  of  a 
sea,  or  beyond  a  river  that  the  living  cannot  cross, 
or  to  ascend  to  the  sky  by  the  path  of  the  milky 
way,  or  in  the  bark  of  the  sun-god.  Others  put 
this  abode  of  the  shades  underground,  a  dismal  cav¬ 
ern  in  the  heart  of  the  earth  like  the  Babylonian 
Aralu,  the  Hebrew  Sheol,  the  Greek  Hades,  or,  with 
another  imagery,  the  Egyptian  realm  of  Osiris,  the 
dead  god.  When  various  notions  concurred,  as  in 
Egypt,  they  were  easily  harmonized  by  the  belief, 
common  among  savages,  that  man  has  more  than 
one  soul,  a  ghost  soul,  or  wraith,  that  inhabits  the 
tomb  or  the  nether  world,  and  a  spirit  soul  that  flies 


112  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


away  to  a  spirit  world,  and  is  therefore  often  imag¬ 
ined  as  winged,  in  Egyptian  art  a  bird  with  a  human 
head,  in  Greek  a  butterfly,  Psyche. 

Social  distinctions  establish  themselves  among  the 
dead  earlier  than  moral.  The  great  of  this  earth 
get  a  place  of  their  own  apart  from  the  vulgar  herd, 
as  they  have  in  burial,  some  Elysian  Plain  at  the 
ends  of  the  earth  such  as  Homer  describes,  or  Is¬ 
lands  of  the  Blessed,  or  the  Fields  of  Earn,  where 
the  Egyptian  nobles  employed  their  everlasting  lei¬ 
sure  in  playing  checkers,  while  porcelain  slaves, 
made  real  by  the  magical  word,  did  their  work  for 
them  on  the  canals  and  in  fields  of  giant  wheat. 
As  in  these  cases,  the  land  of  the  favored  dead  is 
often  the  abode  of  the  gods,  to  whose  company  kings 
and  heroes  are  admitted  as  at  least  half  divine. 

In  Egypt  we  see  with  peculiar  clearness  how  a 
place  after  death  in  the  boat  of  the  sun,  which  was 
originally  the  exclusive  prerogative  of  the  king  as 
the  son  of  Ra,  the  sun-god,  was  extended  to  such 
as  had  no  pretension  to  so  august  a  lineage;  and 
how  the  deliverance  from  the  perils  of  the  nether 
world  in  the  religion  of  Osiris  was  in  time  appro¬ 
priated  by  all  classes.  The  masses,  by  providing 
themselves  with  guide  books  to  Hades,  magical  for¬ 
mulas  and  passwords,  and  protective  amulets,  usurped 
the  privileges  of  their  betters  in  another  world,  if 


AFTER  DEATH 


113 


they  had  no  aspirations  to  democratic  equality  in 
this. 

The  beginnings  of  what  we  may  call  a  heaven — 
though  not  always  or  even  commonly  in  the  heavens 
— are  here  obvious.  The  opposite,  the  first  threat- 
enings  of  hell,  are  found  in  the  consigning  to  a  place 
apart  of  men  who  were  guilty  of  monstrous  crimes — 
a  kind  of  post-mortem  outlawry.  In  the  Rig  Veda 
the  poet  invokes  Indra  and  Soma  to  hurl  such  “  into 
prison,  into  fathomless  darkness,  whence  none  shall 
emerge.”  They  have  “  prepared  for  themselves  that 
deep  place.”  Into  the  picture  of  Hades  in  the 
Eleventh  Book  of  the  Odyssey,  the  dismal  abode  of 
all  the  shades,  were  introduced  by  a  later  hand  the 
figures  of  Tityos,  Tantalos,  Sisyphos,  undergoing 
their  several  ingenious  torments  for  offenses  against 
the  gods.  It  is  to  be  noted,  however,  that  none  of 
these  are  mere  men,  and  that  their  offenses  are  per¬ 
sonal  to  the  gods  and  in  only  one  case  also  moral. 

The  abode  of  the  gods  and  of  the  great  of  earth 
becomes  in  time  the  reward  of  the  conspicuously 
good  of  less  eminent  station.  The  standard  of  fit¬ 
ness  for  this  distinction  is  primarily  religious,  rather 
than  moral.  The  good  man  is  he  who  is  most  scru¬ 
pulous  in  religious  observances,  most  abundant  in 
sacrifices  and  homage  to  the  gods,  most  liberal  to 
their  ministers.  In  the  Brahmanic  religion  such  men 


114  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


go  to  the  heaven  of  the  gods,  whither  their  good 
works  have  preceded  them,  and  enjoy  the  reward 
of  their  piety  in  celestial  bliss.  The  opposite  fate 
awaits  not  only  the  flagrantly  wicked,  as  in  the 
olden  time,  but  those  who  neglect  religion  and  store 
up  no  such  merit  above.  So  the  priests  classify  the 
good  and  the  bad. 

The  moralizing  of  the  hereafter  is  a  later  stage. 
It  is  represented  in  Egypt  by  the  Osirian  judgment 
portrayed  in  the  125th  chapter  of  the  Booh  of  the 
Dead ,  according  to  the  current  numeration.  Here 
the  dead  man  is  conducted  to  the  judgment  hall, 
and  there  makes  his  solemn  protestation  of  innocence 
of  a  long  catalogue  of  misdeeds  against  gods  and 
men — chiefly  the  latter.  The  moral  standard  is  that 
of  an  advanced  civilization,  and  in  parts  of  notable 
elevation.  The  conscientiousness  of  the  profession 
is  tested  by  weighing  the  man’s  heart  in  balances 
against  an  ostrich  feather,  the  attribute  of  the 
goddess  Truth,  while  Thoth,  as  clerk  of  the  court, 
records  the  verdict.  The  justified  man  is  led  into 
the  sanctuary  where  Osiris  is  seated  on  his  throne, 
while  the  fate  of  the  condemned  is  grimly  hinted 
by  the  figure  of  a  monster  called  the  “Devouress” 
who  squats  open-mouthed  beside  the  scales.  From 
a  frieze  a  long  array  of  assessors  of  the  court  look 
down  on  the  scene. 


AFTER  DEATH 


115 


The  moral  condition  of  man’s  destiny  in  the  here¬ 
after  in  this  chapter  of  the  Book  of  the  Bead  did 
not  supersede  the  very  different  representations  in 
other  parts  of  that  heterogenous  collection,  in  which 
good  and  bad  alike  are  exposed  to  the  perils  of  the 
nether  world  and  come  safely  through  them  only  by 
knowing  what  to  expect,  and  the  charms  proper  to 
be  used  in  each  emergency.  The  Egyptians  had  in 
fact  so  long  been  used  to  assure  their  safety  beneath 
the  earth  by  magical  means  that  they  employed 
charms  and  amulets  to  protect  themselves  against 
a  merited  condemnation  in  the  Osirian  judgment, 
including  an  adjuration  to  a  man’s  own  heart  (con¬ 
science)  not  to  contradict  his  profession  of  innocence. 

The  case  is  peculiarly  instructive.  The  whole 
history  of  religions  shows  that  if  a  high  moral  stand¬ 
ard  is  set  up  and  man’s  destiny  is  to  be  determined 
solely  by  his  guilt  or  innocence,  self-knowledge  will 
drive  him  either  to  seek  a  religious  remedy,  or,  in 
the  lack  of  that,  to  fall  back  on  a  magical  one,  or, 
as  is  often  the  case,  to  make  assurance  doubly  sure 
by  combining  the  two.  How  much  influence  the 
Osirian  judgment  had  in  the  subsequent  history  of 
religion  in  Egypt  is  unknown;  that  it  did  not  trans¬ 
form  it  is  certain. 

From  the  separation  of  the  conspicuously  good 
and  the  flagrantly  bad  at  death,  religion  went  on 


116  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


to  universalize  the  division — all  the  good  and  all 
the  bad,  however  the  two  classes  were  constituted — 
and  depicted  the  blessedness  of  the  one  and  the 
misery  of  the  other.  The  former  went  to  the  realm 
of  the  gods,  wherever  that  was,  and  lived  immortally 
in  the  company  of  gods  and  heroes  and  the  good 
and  great  of  all  generations,  wdiile  the  bad  suffered 
not  only  the  privation  of  this  good,  but  endured 
the  worst  evils  men  could  think  of.  In  some  cases 
the  two  classes  go  to  their  own  places  as  of  them¬ 
selves,  or  they  are  sorted  out  by  an  automatic  device, 
such  as  a  log  thrown  across  a  chasm,  which  the  good 
cross  safely  while  the  bad  fall  off,  as  was  imagined 
by  some  of  the  American  Indians,  or  the  Cinvat 
bridge  which  serves  the  same  end  in  Zoroastrianism. 
Other  religions  conceive  the  diverse  fate  of  men  as 
the  sentence  of  inexorable  judges,  before  whom  the 
disembodied  souls  are  forthwith  conducted  to  be 
tried. 

The  oldest  idea  of  retribution  is  retaliation — an 
eye  for  an  eye,  a  tooth  for  a  tooth — and  when 
imagination  employed  itself  in  picturing  this  retali¬ 
atory  justice,  it  fitted  the  torment  to  the  offense, 
and  in  the  end,  as  in  India,  divided  hell  into  a  multi¬ 
tude  of  compartments,  each  with  appropriate  tortures 
for  particular  kinds  of  sinners. 

Among  many  savages  it  is  believed  that  the  souls 


AFTER  DEATH 


117 


of  the  dead  come  back  into  other  bodies,  quickening 
the  embryo  in  the  mother’s  womb  or  taking  up  its 
abode  in  the  infant  body  at  birth.  It  is  also  a  com¬ 
mon  notion  that  human  souls  may  enter  into  the 
bodies  of  other  animals.  Such  metamorphoses  may 
be  wrought  by  the  malice  of  sorcerers  or  by  the 
vengeance  of  demons  or  gods;  a  man  may  himself 
assume  such  a  form  by  magic.  But  the  re-ombodi- 
ment  of  souls  after  death  and  their  fortunes  or 
misfortunes  in  the  subsequent  life  may  also  be  be¬ 
lieved  to  be  determined  by  their  character  in  a 
former  life.  A  violent  and  ruthless  man,  who  had 
the  disposition  and  behavior  of  a  tiger,  may  come 
back  as  a  real  tiger,  more  cunning  and  cruel  than  a 
mere  tiger  with  a  proper  tiger’s  soul,  and  be  hunted 
to  death  with  an  energy  and  persistence  fitting  his 
extraordinary  dangerousness. 

In  India  these  primitive  notions  were  taken  up, 
as  early  at  least  as  the  Upanishads,  into  higher  re¬ 
ligious  thought,  and  generalized.  Character  makes 
character:  “the  doer  of  good  becomes  good;  the 
doer  of  evil  becomes  evil.”  Below  this  high  philo¬ 
sophical  level,  the  doctrine  prevailed  that  every  soul 
was  re-embodied  as  man  or  beast  in  a  form  and 
state,  and  with  a  consequent  lot  in  life,  determined 
by  its  character  in  its  former  existence.  And  even¬ 
tually  not  by  character  as  a  totality  or  an  aver- 


118  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


age.  Every  single  act  had  its  consequence;  it  was 
like  a  seed  which  in  due  time  bore  its  fruit  ac¬ 
cording  to  its  kind,  or,  to  express  it  in  our  way,  it 
was  a  cause  which  produced  its  proper  effect  by 
inflexible  natural  law.  This  is  the  doctrine  of  Karma , 
“the  deed,”  which  thenceforth  dominated  all  Indian 
thinking  about  man’s  destiny.  What  added  to  the 
terror  of  the  doctrine  is  that  the  round  of  death  and 
birth  had  neither  beginning  nor  end;  from  eternity 
to  eternity  an  infinite  series  of  re-embodiments  under 
the  law  of  Karma  runs  on,  each  life  a  link  in  an 
endless  chain. 

The  law  of  Karma  is  not  an  ordinance  of  the  gods. 
So  far  from  creating  or  administering  it,  the  gods 
themselves  are  subject  to  it;  they  also  are  bound  on 
the  endlessly  revolving  wheel  of  rebirth.  There  is 
no  judge  and  no  judgment;  no  punishment,  no  re¬ 
pentance  or  amends,  no  remission  of  sins  by  divine 
clemency.  It  is  just  the  inexorable  causal  nexus  of 
the  eternal  universe  itself.  So  firmly  rooted  was 
this  conviction  that  it  could  go  on  in  original  Bud¬ 
dhism  without  any  soul  to  transmigrate,  Karma 
alone  connecting  one  life  with  another. 

The  belief  in  retribution  for  the  deeds  of  this  life 
in  the  heaven  of  the  gods  or  in  an  appropriate  hell 
was  long  established  in  India  before  the  consistent 
development  of  the  doctrine  of  Karma,  and  the  two 


AFTER  DEATH 


119 


were  harmonized  by  interposing  the  finite  rewards 
of  heaven  and  the  finite  punishments  of  hell  between 
every  two  earthly  lives,  precisely  as  we  find  it  sub¬ 
sequently  in  Plato. 

In  Greece  new  notions  about  the  fate  of  man  after 
death  gained  wide  currency  in  the  sixth  century, 
and  had  thenceforth  large  influence  both  in  religion 
and  philosophy.  The  starting-point  here  was  the 
belief,  perhaps  derived  from  the  Thracians  by  way 
of  the  Bacchic-Orphic  religions,  that  a  happy  im¬ 
mortality  belongs  by  nature  only  to  divine  beings; 
it  is  indeed  their  supreme  prerogative.  Human 
nature  is  mortal,  and  the  blessed  lot  of  the  immortals 
in  their  Elysium,  bright  with  eternal  sunshine,  with 
its  fragrant  airs  and  sweet  sounds,  stands  in  the 
strongest  contrast  to  the  cold  darkness  of  the  miry 
pit  which  is  the  final  abode  of  the  undivine.  The 
older  Hades  was  also  dismal  gloom,  but  new  horrors 
were  added  to  it  by  barbarian  imagination.  This 
hell  is  not  the  punishment  of  sin,  but  the  fate  of  man 
because  he  is  man  and  not  god. 

It  has  already  been  remarked  that  the  notion  of 
re-embodiment  which  we  call  the  transmigration  of 
souls  is  found  in  many  parts  of  the  world  among 
races  on  low  planes  of  culture.  The  question  where 
man’s  soul  comes  from  is  in  fact  as  natural,  though 
perhaps  not  as  early,  as  the  question  whither  it  goes. 


120  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


A  belief  in  transmigration  is  attributed  to  the  Thra¬ 
cian  Getse,  and  it  is  not  improbable  that  it  came 
into  Greece  from  the  same  quarter  and  by  the  same 
channels  as  the  notions  described  in  the  preceding 
paragraph.  In  literature  it  first  appears  upon  the 
scene  in  Sicily  and  Southern  Italy,  and  achieved  a 
place  in  Greek  philosophy  through  Pythagoras  and 
Plato.  A  reminiscence  of  its  Thracian  origin  may 
be  confusedly  preserved  in  the  legend  which  brings 
Zalmoxis  into  connection  with  Pythagoras.  The 
Greeks  thought  that  it  came  from  Egypt;  many 
modern  scholars  believe  that  the  idea  wras  imported 
from  India. 

The  Greek  doctrine  is,  however,  significantly  differ¬ 
ent  from  the  Indian  as  it  has  been  outlined  above. 
For  the  Greeks  the  soul  is  a  fallen  divinity,  which 
is  here  in  this  sublunary  world  and  imprisoned  in  a 
material  mortal  body  in  consequence  of  sin.  Pindar 
speaks  vaguely  of  “the  ancient  guilt  Empedocles 
of  bloodshed  and  perjury.  By  a  decree  of  the  gods, 
one  of  the  divine  beings  ( daimones )  wdio  has  com¬ 
mitted  such  offenses  is  condemned  to  wander  thrice 
ten  thousand  seasons  (10,000  years)  far  from  the 
blessed,  being  born  through  all  that  time  in  all  man¬ 
ner  of  forms  of  mortal  creatures,  exchanging  one 
grievous  path  of  life  for  another.  In  these  earthly 
lives  the  soul  is  subject  to  physical  and  moral  de- 


AFTER  DEATH 


121 


filement;  the  body  is  the  tomb  of  the  soul,  or  its 
prison-house,  its  transient  tabernacle,  its  vesture  of 
flesh,  its  filthy  garment.  In  Greece,  as  in  India, 
the  belief  in  metempsychosis  was  combined  with  the 
earlier  notions  of  retribution  in  another  sphere  of 
existence;  a  thousand  years  of  Hades  are  interposed 
between  successive  embodiments  on  earth.  The 
souls  wdiich  thus  expiated  their  original  fault,  and, 
mindful  of  their  higher  nature,  kept  themselves  pure 
from  the  temptations  of  sense  and  the  pollution  of 
things  unclean,  were  at  length  released,  and  regained 
their  primal  state. 

As  in  ancient  religions  generally,  guilt  is  conceived 
as  defilement;  the  remedy  in  the  Pythagorean 
scheme  is  physical  purification  by  an  ascetic  regimen 
and  intellectual  catharsis  by  the  philosophic  life. 
Substantially  the  same  ideas  appear  in  Plato,  with 
the  important  difference  that  the  origin  of  the  evil 
is  not  a  mythical  crime:  the  fall  of  the  soul  is 
within  the  soul  itself,  the  failure  of  the  intellectual 
element  to  master  the  passions  and  appetites;  and 
inasmuch  as  this  disaster  is  intellectual  and  moral, 
the  remedy  is  not  found  in  physical  or  magical  rem¬ 
edies,  but  in  the  clarification  of  the  intellect  by 
philosophy  and  the  mind’s  recovery  of  its  mastery 
in  the  soul  by  virtue. 

Where  men  came  to  entertain  such  more  definite 


122  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


notions  about  a  future  existence,  whether  they  im¬ 
agined  hells  of  torment  for  the  misdeeds  of  this  life, 
or  an  endless  round  of  rebirths  determined  by  char¬ 
acter  in  antecedent  existences,  whether  they  thought 
of  the  soul  as  a  fallen  divinity  condemned  to  expiate 
“the  ancient  guilt,”  or  lapsed  from  its  high  estate 
by  the  subjection  of  reason  to  lower  impulses,  or  of 
the  miry  pit  in  which  all  the  dead  wallow  because 
they  are  not  divine,  men’s  minds  were  more  and 
more  preoccupied  with  what  is  after  death  and  all 
its  possibilities  of  woe,  and  therewith  religion  entered 
on  a  new  stage.  Hitherto  men  had  sought  through 
religion  only  security  against  natural  ills  and  perils 
such  as  they  had  experience  of  in  this  life,  and  a 
sufficiency  of  the  good  things  that  nature  could  give 
for  their  enjoyment.  So  far  as  they  concerned  them¬ 
selves  about  the  after-life,  it  was  to  insure  a  continu¬ 
ation  of  the  same  enjoyment  there  by  provision  of 
things  needful  for  it.  Now  the  primal  motive  of 
self-preservation  made  them  turn  to  religion  for  a 
way  of  escape  from  the  terrible  evils  with  which 
imagination,  once  stimulated  to  the  task,  filled  the 
hereafter,  and  for  the  assurance  of  a  blessed  im¬ 
mortality  like  that  of  the  gods. 

It  has  already  been  remarked  more  than  once  that 
the  character  of  a  religion  is  primarily  determined 
by  what  men  seek  in  it,  and  this  new  demand  for  a 


AFTER  DEATH 


123 


good  that  lies  beyond  the  mortal  life  and  surpasses 
all  finite  goods  created  a  new  type  of  religion,  with 
corresponding  changes  in  the  ideas  of  the  powers  to 
which  man  turns  for  salvation  and  of  the  things  he 
must  do  to  secure  it. 

The  religions  we  have  previously  considered  may 
be  called  natural  religions,  in  the  sense  that  what 
men  seek  in  them  are  natural  goods,  the  good  things 
of  this  life.  Those  to  which  we  now  turn  our  atten¬ 
tion  might  correspondingly  be  named  supernatural 
religions  inasmuch  as  they  answer  man’s  desire  for 
the  good  things  of  another  life,  goods  beyond  the 
nature  we  know.  “ Supernatural”  has,  however,  so 
long  been  used  to  designate  not  the  end  but  the 
divine  origin  of  certain  religions  that  it  is  inexpedient 
to  use  it  in  an  entirely  different  sense.  They  have 
frequently  been  called  “  redemptive  religions,”  an 
attempt,  apparently,  to  English  the  German  term, 
Erldsungsreligionen .  In  the  meaning  naturally  put 
on  the  word  “redemptive,”  Christianity  is  the  only 
one  of  them  properly  so  called.  Since  their  char¬ 
acteristic  is  that  they  present  themselves  as  ways  of 
salvation,  a  more  suitable  name  would  be  “soteric 
religions.”  The  name  is,  however,  of  less  conse¬ 
quence  than  the  recognition  of  the  fact  that  they 
are  a  new  kind  and  constitute  a  class  by  themselves. 

Between  them  and  the  older  natural  religions 


124  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


there  was  no  necessary  conflict,  for  the  old  religions 
had  to  do  only  with  the  public  and  private  interests 
of  this  world,  while  the  new  concerned  themselves 
solely  with  the  fate  of  the  individual  beyond  the 
tomb,  and  since  the  former  are  real  and  permanent 
interests,  men  pursued  them  in  the  accustomed  way. 
The  old  religions  were,  moreover,  the  religions  of 
political  communities,  or  states,  into  which  a  man  is 
born,  and  by  this  fact  is  bound  to  worship  the  gods 
of  his  people  or  country  with  the  established  cere¬ 
monies,  whatever  else  he  may  be  moved  to  do  to 
save  his  owTn  soul.  Sometimes  the  law  may  prohibit 
the  introduction  of  new  gods  and  strange  rites;  but 
the  pains  and  penalties  of  human  law  have  always 
in  the  end  proved  ineffective  to  deter  men  from 
resorting  to  them  for  deliverance  from  the  worse 
evils  of  the  other  wrorld. 

It  is  improbable  that  in  general  the  posthumous 
perils  of  the  soul  profoundly  affected  the  unimagi¬ 
native  multitudes,  for  whom  present  ills  were  a 
sufficiently  absorbing  preoccupation.  But  it  is  evi¬ 
dent  that  for  many,  salvation  after  death — to  con¬ 
dense  it  into  our  familiar  phrase — became  a  matter 
of  grave  concern,  and  led  them  to  addict  themselves 
to  the  religions  or  philosophies  which  professed  to 
have  the  secret  of  it.  In  some  periods  and  in  certain 
classes  the  good  and  evil  that  lie  beyond  death  have 


AFTER  DEATH 


125 


acquired  such  a  preponderance  in  men’s  thought 
that  mundane  goods  even  in  the  richest  measure 
seem  to  be  worthless  by  comparison,  and  the  enjoy¬ 
ment  of  them  or  desire  for  them,  by  engrossing  man’s 
interest  and  making  him  heedless  of  what  comes 
after,  are  regarded  as  the  great  hindrance  to  salva¬ 
tion,  so  that  the  renunciation  of  the  world  and  all 
earthly  goods  becomes  its  first  negative  condition, 
and  an  ascetic  regimen,  physical  as  well  as  moral  and 
intellectual,  its  positive  method.  This  has  had  its 
fullest  development  in  the  philosophies  or  philoso¬ 
phized  religions  for  which  salvation  is  essentially  the 
emancipation  of  the  soul,  conceived  as  pure  intellect, 
from  the  bondage  of  matter  and  sense,  and  the 
realization  of  its  divine  nature. 

The  soteric  religions  differ  very  widely  among 
themselves  in  consequence  of  their  different  ante¬ 
cedents,  peculiarities  of  race  temperament,  culture, 
history,  and  other  circumstances.  The  influence  of 
individual  prophets,  founders,  reformers,  thinkers, 
is  also  much  more  strongly  impressed  on  them  than 
on  the  natural  religions.  The  way  of  salvation  is 
primarily  determined  by  the  nature  of  the  evil  to 
be  escaped  and  the  good  to  be  achieved,  and  of  their 
causes. 

The  way  of  salvation  must  take  a  totally  different 
direction  where  the  happiness  or  misery  of  man  after 


126  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


death  is  conceived  as  divine  retribution,  the  misdeeds 
of  men  against  the  gods  or  their  fellows  being  pun¬ 
ished  by  imprisonment  and  torment  in  hell  while 
the  goodness  of  the  good  is  rewarded  by  blessed 
immortality  in  the  abode  of  the  gods,  and  where 
God  cannot  only  punish  but  forgive,  from  what  it 
has  when  every  single  act,  word,  and  even  thought 
of  man  produces  a  corresponding  fruit  in  another 
existence  by  an  inflexible  law  of  cause  and  effect 
from  which  the  very  gods  are  not  exempted,  as  in 
religions  of  India.  Still  different  must  the  w~ay  of 
salvation  be  where  immortality  is  an  attribute  of 
divinity,  of  which  human  nature  as  such  is  incapable. 

Finally,  religions  of  this  type  have  affected  one 
another  in  various  ways,  and  been  affected  by  the 
natural  religions  which  surround  them.  A  morpho¬ 
logical  classification  on  any  principle  is  peculiarly 
difficult,  and  no  consistent  scheme  is  wholly  satis¬ 
factory.  It  will  serve  our  purpose  best  to  make  one 
class  of  the  religions  which  not  only  present  them¬ 
selves  as  a  way  of  salvation  after  death  for  indi¬ 
viduals,  but  set  as  an  ultimate  goal  the  triumph  of 
good  over  evil  in  the  realm  of  nature  as  wTell  as  in 
the  world  of  men  and  spirits,  and  the  transformation 
of  this  earth  into  a  fitting  abode  for  the  good  in  a 
transfigured  bodily  existence;  while  in  the  second 
class  we  include  the  various  religions  in  which  the 


AFTER  DEATH 


127 


idea  of  salvation  is  the  deliverance  of  the  individual 
soul  from  embodied  existence  in  a  world  of  matter 
and  sense.  The  former  are  emphatically  theistic  re¬ 
ligions,  and  their  gods  are  rulers  of  this  world  and 
givers  of  good  in  it  as  well  as  saviors  in  another. 
The  latter  may  be  monistic  or  pantheistic,  theistic 
or  atheistic.  The  former  are  also  essentially  ethical, 
assigning  to  man  a  part,  with  God,  in  bringing  about 
the  good  world  that  is  to  be.  To  the  first  category 
belong  Zoroastrianism,  Judaism  in  its  orthodox 
form,  and  Mohammedanism;  to  the  second  the 
soteric  religions  and  philosophies  of  India  and  of 
Greece,  and  the  native  and  foreign  mysteries  of  the 
Hellenistic-Roman  world.  Christianity,  as  we  shall 
see,  is  a  fusion  of  the  two. 


CHAPTER  VII 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 

Of  the  religions  which  look  forward  to  the  com¬ 
plete  triumph  of  good  over  evil  on  this  earth,  the 
oldest  is  that  which,  after  the  name  of  its  founder, 
wre  call  Zoroastrianism,  or  by  the  name  of  its  God, 
Mazdaism.  The  beginnings  of  this  religion  are  in¬ 
volved  in  impenetrable  obscurity.  So  much  is  clear, 
that  it  was  not  the  natural  evolution  of  an  Iranian 
nature  religion,  but  a  prophetic  reform  or  revolution 
writhin  such  a  religion.  As  the  wave  of  reform  lost 
force  in  its  extension,  and  other  branches  of  the 
Iranian  race,  or  peoples  of  other  races  brought  under 
its  empire,  adopted  the  religion,  much  of  the  older 
Iranian  religion  and  many  foreign  elements  were 
absorbed  in  Zoroastrianism;  but  it  never  lost  its 
distinctive  character. 

The  old  Iranian  religion  was  a  natural  polytheism 
closely  related  to  that  of  their  Aryan  kinsmen  in 
India.  The  same  gods  belong  to  both  races,  their 
mythology  has  large  common  elements,  the  peculiar 
features  of  the  cultus  are  the  same.  Zoroaster  re¬ 
jected  all  these  gods  with  their  priesthood,  and 

abolished  the  bloody  sacrifices.  There  is  only  one 

128 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


129 


god,  whose  significant  name  is  Mazda,  Wisdom,  with 
the  title  Lord  (Ahura  Mazda) ;  most  intimately  as¬ 
sociated  with  him  are  Good  Mind  (Vohu  Mano), 
his  first  creation  (good  intelligence,  purpose,  dispo¬ 
sition),  and  Asha  (Right,  as  conformity  to  the  moral 
order),  Sovereignty,  Piety,  and  other  immortal  be¬ 
neficent  powers.  Of  the  ancient  cultus  Zoroaster 
preserved  only  the  care  of  the  sacred  fire  and  the 
libation  of  Haoma,  corresponding  to  the  Indian 
Soma  offering.  On  the  other  hand,  he  put  a  greatly 
heightened  emphasis  on  the  ethical  side,  condemning 
much  in  the  hereditary  customs  of  his  people,  and 
prescribing  others  in  accordance  with  the  new  re¬ 
ligious  principles. 

The  reform  was  involved  from  the  outset  in  con¬ 
flict  with  the  old  religion  and  all  its  supporters, 
priests,  rulers,  and  people.  The  reformer’s  world 
was  divided  into  two  camps,  those  who  were  for  the 
reform  and  those  who  were  against  it,  the  followers 
of  truth  and  the  partisans  of  the  lie,  and  the  same 
division  was  run  through  everything.  Over  against 
the  one  wise  and  good  God  were  the  gods  of  the  old 
religion,  who,  in  their  opposition  to  the  true  God, 
became  the  demons  of  the  new;  over  against  the 
Iranian  believers  were  their  Turanian  foes;  over 
against  an  agricultural  and  pastoral  civilization,  the 
predatory  hordes  on  the  borders;  over  against  do- 


130  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


mestic  cattle,  wild  beasts  and  venomous  reptiles; 
over  against  the  grass  and  grain  that  gave  food  to 
man  and  beast,  all  harmful  and  poisonous  plants; 
and  so  on  through  every  sphere  of  the  natural  and 
supernatural. 

Those  who  joined  the  reform  did  so  of  their  own 
choice,  and  so  did  those  who  refused  it.  The  gen¬ 
eralization  of  this  experience  led  to  the  conviction 
that  every  man,  of  his  own  free  will,  enlists  in  the 
army  of  truth  and  righteousness  and  goodness  or 
in  that  of  the  enemies  of  all  these.  The  world  is 
thus  a  great  battle-field,  in  which  not  only  all  intelli¬ 
gent  beings  but  all  things  else,  even  climates,  are 
arrayed  on  one  side  or  the  other.  This  conflict  goes 
back  to  the  beginning  of  the  present  age  of  the 
world;  it  has  its  prototypes  in  the  two  primal  spirits, 
the  good,  or  beneficent  spirit,  and  the  evil,  or  baleful 
spirit,  which  at  the  beginning  chose  good  and  evil 
respectively.  It  is  the  age-long  war  between  Ahura 
Mazda  and  Ahriman — God  and  the  Devil,  we  should 
say.  It  will  end  in  the  complete  triumph  of  the 
Lord,  and  the  discomfiture  of  all  that  opposes  him. 
Then  good  will  prevail  universally,  and  all  evil  be 
everlastingly  destroyed.  The  world  will  be  trans¬ 
formed  into  an  abode  of  the  blest;  hell  itself,  purified 
by  fire,  will  be  annexed  to  the  habitable  earth  to 
enlarge  its  borders. 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


131 


The  earliest  teaching  of  the  religion  was  that  this 
crisis  in  the  history  of  the  world  was  close  at  hand, 
and  that  therefore  it  behooved  every  man  to  enlist 
without  delay  on  the  side  whose  victory  was  near 
and  sure,  before  the  day  of  the  fiery  ordeal  came 
and  it  was  too  late.  On  that  day  not  only  the  living 
would  appear  in  the  great  assize,  but  the  bodies  of 
the  dead  would  be  recreated  and  reunited  with 
their  former  souls  to  receive  their  reward  or  suffer 
their  doom  according  to  the  side  on  which  they  had 
striven  in  life.  The  good  should  be  immortal  in  a 
transfigured  bodily  existence  on  a  purified  and  trans¬ 
formed  earth  from  which  every  evil  thing  was  forever 
banished;  while  the  bad  suffered  the  torment  of 
fire. 

As  time  went  by,  and  the  great  crisis  of  history 
did  not  arrive,  the  fortune  of  souls  between  death 
and  this  postponed  judgment  was  determined  on  the 
same  principle.  Three  days  after  death  the  souls 
were  conducted  before  the  judges  of  the  dead,  who 
weighed  their  good  and  evil  deeds — among  which 
their  religion  weighed  heavily — in  balances  that 
never  swerved  a  hair  from  even  justice.  Thence 
they  passed  to  the  ordeal  of  the  bridge  stretched 
over  a  fathomless  gorge.  For  the  good  it  was  a 
broad  highway,  and  on  the  other  side  they  passed 
through  successive  vestibules  of  good  thoughts,  good 


132  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


words,  good  deeds,  into  the  light  which  surrounds 
the  Lord  himself;  for  the  bad  it  was  narrow  as  the 
edge  of  a  sword,  and  they  hurtled  into  the  abyss 
below,  there  to  abide  till  the  day  of  resurrection 
and  the  last  judgment. 

There  was  but  one  way  of  salvation:  the  ac¬ 
ceptance  of  the  sole  true  religion  and  conformity  to 
its  sacred  law.  This  law,  at  least  as  we  know  it 
in  the  later  development  of  the  religion,  was  in  large 
part  concerned  with  the  avoidance  of  all  things  and 
acts  that  defiled  with  a  demonic  contagion,  and 
with  rites  of  purification  or  expiation — a  disinfection 
from  such  contagion.  Extravagant  penances  are 
imposed  on  transgressors,  and  a  confession  of  sins 
belongs  to  the  office  for  the  dying.  But  the  primary 
content  of  the  law  was  moral:  good  thoughts,  good 
words,  good  deeds,  is  the  ever-recurring  formula; 
and  good  is  all  that  which  conduces  to  the  victory 
over  evil  in  physical  nature  as  well  as  in  the  life 
of  society,  and  to  the  triumph  of  the  true  religion. 
It  is  an  essentially  ethical  religion. 

Zoroastrianism  is  an  eminently  militant  faith. 
Man  wins  his  own  salvation  by  strenuous  effort  for 
the  triumph  of  the  will  of  a  good  God  realized  in 
a  good  world — we  might  say  man  saves  himself  by 
striving  with  God  for  the  salvation  of  the  world. 
Flight  from  the  world  would  be  desertion  in  the 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


133 


face  of  the  enemy;  man’s  calling  is  to  overcome  the 
evil  in  the  world,  not  to  despair  of  it.  There  is  a 
deep  realization  of  the  evil  of  the  present  world, 
but  of  the  ultimate  triumph  of  truth  and  righteous¬ 
ness  and  goodness  not  a  shadow  of  doubt. 

Zoroastrianism  was  from  the  beginning  much 
concerned  with  what  is  after  death.  The  prophet 
made  it  a  chief  motive  for  the  conversion  of  indi¬ 
viduals  to  his  reform.  It  was  quite  otherwise  wdth 
the  national  religion  of  Israel.  There  the  belief  in 
a  divine  retribution  first  established  itself  in  col¬ 
lective  form.  The  apostasy  of  the  nation  from  the 
religion  of  its  fathers  into  the  worship  of  foreign 
gods  provoked  the  wrath  of  their  own  God,  which 
visited  itself  upon  them  in  national  disaster.  The 
prophets,  from  the  eighth  century  on,  laid  no  less 
emphasis  upon  the  wrongs  that  men  did  to  their 
fellows — the  perversion  of  justice  by  those  in  power, 
the  oppression  of  the  poor  by  the  rich  in  the  new 
economic  conditions  of  the  time,  and  the  vices  that 
were  associated  with  the  nature  religions  of  the 
Canaanites  or  the  neighboring  nations.  God  was 
not  only  the  vindicator  of  his  own  honor  but  the 
avenger  of  social  wrongs  and  personal  badness. 
The  nation  that  did  such  things  or  tolerated  them 
he  would  destroy.  The  agencies  of  his  judgment 


134  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


were  the  great  empires  that  were  beginning  to  loom 
upon  the  horizon  of  the  petty  states  of  Western 
Syria,  first  the  Assyrians,  then  the  Babylonians. 
The  event  ultimately  justified  the  prediction  and 
gave  the  verification  of  history  to  the  moral  concep¬ 
tion  of  the  character  of  Jehovah. 

After  the  destruction  of  Jewish  nationality  by 
the  Babylonians  at  the  end  of  the  sixth  century,  the 
older  vague  notion  of  individual  divine  retribution 
in  this  life,  according  to  which  the  good  prospered 
and  the  bad  suffered  evils  in  this  life  or  were  cut 
off  in  the  midst  of  it,  was  further  developed  by  an 
individual  interpretation  of  the  prophetic  doctrine 
of  national  retribution.  God  became  a  God  of  dis¬ 
tributive  justice  who  requited  every  man  according 
to  his  deserts  in  kind  and  measure.  The  lengths 
to  which  orthodoxy  pushed  its  logic  in  this  direction 
is  best  seen  in  the  arguments  of  Job’s  uncomfortable 
comforters — a  great  sufferer  must  be  a  great  sinner; 
to  deny  that  is  to  impugn  the  justice  of  God  which 
is  a  corner-stone  of  religion.  Human  experience 
corresponds  very  ill  to  this  dogma.  The  author  of 
the  Book  of  Job  strives  to  refute  it,  though  he  finds 
no  theodicy  to  substitute  for  it.  All  he  can  say  is 
that  God’s  dealings  with  men  are  as  inscrutable  as 
his  operations  in  nature.  A  more  sceptical  attitude 
to  the  morality  of  Providence  is  seen  in  the  Book  of 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


135 


Ecclesiastes,  whose  author  can  discover  no  difference 
between  the  lot  of  the  good  and  the  bad  in  this 
world,  and  no  difference  in  their  fate  in  or  after 
death.  For  good  and  bad,  for  man  and  beast  alike, 
death  is  the  end. 

A  welcome  escape  from  the  dilemma,  which  seemed 
to  leave  no  choice  but  either  to  blink  the  patent 
facts  of  experience  or  to  deny  the  justice  of  God, 
was  offered  by  the  idea  of  a  sphere  of  retribution 
beyond  this  life.  The  author  of  Job  apparently 
knew  no  such  conception;  the  author  of  Ecclesiastes 
rejects  it;  Jesus,  the  son  of  Sirach,  ignores  it.  But 
in  the  latter  centuries  before  the  Christian  era  the 
Jews  were  in  contact  with  two  peoples  who  had 
developed  doctrines  of  post-mortem  retribution.  On 
the  one  side  were  the  Persians,  whose  Zoroastrian 
doctrine  was  the  individual  judgment  of  souls  im¬ 
mediately  after  death;  the  separate  lot  of  good  and 
bad  in  happiness  or  woe  until  the  end  of  the  age; 
the  resurrection  of  the  dead  for  a  universal  judgment; 
the  renewal  of  the  earth;  and  the  blessedness  of  the 
age  to  come  for  the  good,  while  the  bad  suffered 
torments.  On  the  other  side  the  Jews  became 
acquainted  with  the  prevailing  Greek  notions  of  the 
native  immortality  of  the  soul  and  of  retribution 
after  death  in  a  disembodied  state. 

To  a  religion  in  which  the  ideas  of  the  justice  of 


136  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 

God  and  his  righteous  retribution,  now  individual¬ 
ized,  were  so  strongly  established,  the  extension  of 
the  sphere  of  retribution  beyond  the  tomb,  whenever 
and  however  the  idea  may  first  have  come,  must 
have  seemed  the  necessary  complement  of  the  doc¬ 
trine  of  retribution  in  this  life,  and  to  be  essentially 
Jewish,  in  whose  hands  soever  they  found  it.  Among 
^  the  Greek-speaking  Jews  Hellenistic  ideas  of  im¬ 
mortality  were  peculiarly  attractive,  especially  to 
the  educated  classes,  while  the  progressive  part  of 
Palestinian  and  Oriental  Judaism  adopted  the  idea 
of  the  resurrection  of  the  body,  a  final  judgment, 
and  a  new  world  for  the  righteous  beyond  judgment. 
In  both,  the  conditions  of  escape  from  evils  beyond 
the  tomb  and  participation  in  future  blessedness 
were  adhesion  to  the  true  religion  with  its  ethical 
monotheism,  and  scrupulous  observance  of  its  re¬ 
ligious  law,  written  and  unwritten,  in  its  ceremonial 
as  well  as  its  moral  part.  For  it  was  all  one  divine 
revelation  of  the  true  religion — what  men  were  to 
believe  about  God  and  what  duties  God  required 
of  men. 

The  Jews  were  well  aware  that  upon  such  con¬ 
ditions,  if  they  were  construed  strictly,  no  man  could 
be  saved;  for  no  man  does,  or  can,  fulfil  the  whole 
law.  God,  too,  knew  this  before  he  ever  gave  the 
law,  before  he  ever  created  frail  man.  Accordingly, 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


137 


in  his  mercy  he  provided  repentance  as  a  remedy  for 
sin.  Here  again  the  prophetic  doctrine  of  national 
repentance  was  individualized,  and  all  the  promises 
in  the  prophets  of  the  restoration  of  God’s  favor  to 
the  penitent  nation  were  appropriated  for  the  in¬ 
dividual.  Repentance  is  the  cardinal  doctrine  of 
salvation  in  Judaism. 

The  Hebrew  word  for  repentance  means  literally 
turning  about  or  turning  back;  its  proper  equivalent 
in  English  is  “ conversion.”  It  is  the  turning  away 
from  evil  courses  of  whatever  nature  to  good,  to 
God,  and  to  willing  obedience  to  his  will.  The 
sincerity  of  repentance  is  proved  by  its  result:  the 
genuinely  penitent  man  does  not  repeat  the  sin  of 
which  he  has  repented,  even  under  strong  tempta¬ 
tion  and  with  full  opportunity. 

All  the  sacrifices  and  expiations  of  the  law,  in¬ 
cluding  the  great  expiation  of  the  Day  of  Atonement, 
do  not  expiate  sin  or  secure  God’s  forgiveness  and 
the  remission  of  the  penalty  without  such  repentance; 
repentance  is  the  condition  of  the  efficacy  of  all  rites. 
Men  are  warned  not  to  imagine  that  they  can  sin, 
expecting  to  make  it  good  with  God  by  repentance, 
and  then  go  and  sin  again.  That  is  no  repentance; 
it  is  nothing  but  a  futile  attempt  to  deceive  God, 
who  know^s  the  hearts  of  men.  But  even  the  great¬ 
est  sinner,  if  he  be  sincerely  repentant,  is  assured 


138  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


of  the  forgiveness  of  God,  and  that  even  to  the  end 
of  his  life.  What  a  Christian  theologian  might  call 
the  temporal  consequences  of  sin  are  not  always 
annulled  by  repentance,  but  in  death  itself  the  last 
remainder  is  expiated,  and  the  blessedness  of  the 
soul  in  the  intermediate  state  and  man’s  partici¬ 
pation  in  the  renewed  world  that  lies  beyond  the 
final  judgment  are  secure. 

In  both  Zoroastrianism  and  Judaism,  faith  in  the 
one  true  God  and  in  the  revelation  he  has  made 
through  his  prophets  is  fundamental;  but  in  neither 
is  this  requisite  so  explicitly  formulated  as  it  is  in 
Mohammedanism.  The  Moslem  profession  of  faith, 
“There  is  no  god  but  God  (Allah)  and  Mohammed 
is  the  messenger  of  God,”  is  the  corner-stone  of  the 
religion  and  the  indispensable  condition  of  salvation. 
In  thus  making  the  acceptance  of  Mohammed,  the 
prophet  or  apostle,  an  article  of  faith  and  condition 
of  salvation  Islam  avows  itself  the  sole  true  religion, 
in  express  opposition  to  Judaism  and  Christianity 
with  their  prophets,  Moses  and  Jesus,  both  of  whom, 
indeed,  delivered  to  their  times  a  revelation  from 
the  same  one  God,  but  revelations  which  had  been 
corrupted  by  those  to  whom  they  wTere  committed, 
and  were  antiquated  by  the  new  and  final  revela¬ 
tion  through  Mohammed. 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


139 


Mohammed’s  ideas  of  the  unity  of  God  and  of 
God’s  insistence  on  the  recognition  of  his  unity  were 
derived  from  Judaism.  From  it  came  also  the  ex¬ 
pectation  of  an  imminent  crisis  and  God’s  judgment 
upon  all  polytheists  and  idolaters.  From  the  same 
source  came  the  resurrection  of  the  dead,  a  paradise 
of  delights  for  believers,  and  a  hell  of  torment  for 
unbelievers.  Mohammed’s  own  idea  of  Paradise, 
with  its  verdant  plains,  its  abundant  streams  and 
pools  of  water,  its  balmy  airs  and  sweet  odors,  is 
the  most  perfect  landscape  a  dweller  in  the  arid  and 
burning  valley  of  Mecca  could  imagine;  the  imagery 
of  the  fiery  hell  is  less  original.  The  books  of  ac¬ 
count  in  which  every  man’s  good  and  evil  deeds 
are  set  down  to  be  produced  at  the  judgment  day, 
and  of  the  judgment  bridge,  were  probably  borrowed 
by  him  from  the  Arabian  Jews,  but  are  ultimately 
of  Zoroastrian  origin,  as  we  have  seen.  What  is 
characteristic  is  the  emphasis  upon  faith  as  the  sine 
qua  non  of  salvation,  with  its  converse,  that  no 
true  believer  shall  finally  be  left  in  hell,  whose  fires 
are  for  such  purgatorial,  while  all  heathen  and  mis¬ 
believers  burn  there  everlastingly. 

While  Judaism  was  a  national  religion  which  in 
later  ages  became  a  religion  of  the  other  world  also, 
and  consequently  opened  its  way  of  salvation  to  all 
who  were  naturalized  in  the  Jewish  people  by  circum- 


140  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


cision  and  baptism,  Mohammedanism  was  in  its 
beginnings  a  way  of  salvation  for  individuals,  which 
became  the  national  religion  of  the  Arabs  by  the 
conversion  to  it  of  the  whole  population  of  the 
peninsula,  and  in  the  next  stage  the  state  religion 
of  the  Arab  empire. 

All  these  religions  were  fundamentally  monothe¬ 
istic  in  principle,  though  their  success  brought  into 
them  much  popular  polytheism  and  demonology, 
more  or  less  disguised.  In  them  all  God  had  given 
a  law  covering  the  whole  of  human  life,  belief,  wor¬ 
ship,  and  observance.  Transgression  or  neglect  was 
punished  by  him  in  this  world,  and  faith  and  obedi¬ 
ence  were  rewarded.  At  death  the  souls  of  the  good 
and  the  bad  were  separated,  and  abode  in  blessed¬ 
ness  or  misery  until  the  last  day.  When  that  day 
came  the  bodies  of  the  dead  would  be  recreated  by 
God  and  reunited  with  their  souls,  to  stand  at  the 
bar  of  God  in  the  last  judgment.  The  scene  of  the 
eternal  beatitude  of  the  saved  was  originally  this 
earth,  renewed  and  glorified,  but  the  imagery  is 
often  unearthly — the  celestial  Garden  of  Eden  dis¬ 
places  the  terrestrial.  In  none  of  them  is  the  good 
world  that  is  to  be  the  outcome  of  an  historical 
process;  it  is  ushered  in  by  the  intervention  of  God 
in  a  great  catastrophe.  But  in  all  of  them  good 
men  toil  and  strive  for  the  supremacy  of  the  true 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


141 


religion,  the  triumph  of  truth  and  right,  in  the  way 
of  God’s  appointment.  Faith  in  God  and  conformity 
to  his  revealed  will  is  the  wTay  of  salvation.  Sin  is 
violation  of  God’s  law,  and  the  greatest  sin  is  un¬ 
belief,  the  rejection  of  God  himself. 

Each  of  them,  like  Christianity,  presented  itself 
as  the  sole  completely  true  religion  and  exclusive 
way  of  salvation,  and  as  such  destined  in  the  end 
to  be  the  universal  religion  of  mankind.  For  the 
achievement  of  this  destiny  its  adherents  were  to 
strive  by  every  means  in  their  power,  a  conviction 
which  gave  a  distinctive  motive  and  character  to 
their  propaganda. 

Of  a  wholly  different  type  from  the  religions  we 
have  hitherto  been  considering,  are  those  wdiich  orig¬ 
inate  in  the  belief  that  immortality  belongs  only 
to  divine  natures,  while  man  by  the  very  constitution 
of  human  nature  is  mortal,  subject  to  the  miseries 
of  this  life,  to  death,  and  after  death  to  a  miserable 
existence  beneath  the  earth — a  survival  which  is  the 
conscious  privation  of  life.  As  was  said  in  the  pre¬ 
ceding  chapter  this  conception  seems  to  have  been 
at  home  among  Thracian  tribes,  wdience  it  made  its 
way  into  Greece  with  the  religion  of  Dionysus  and 
his  rivals  or  satellites  by  the  sixth  century  B.  C. 
With  it  came  crude  notions  of  the  way  by  which 


142  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 

I 

man  might  escape  his  natural  fate  and  secure  a 
blessed  immortality.  If  none  but  gods  can  be  im¬ 
mortal,  man  can  attain  immortality  only  by  becom¬ 
ing  god,  and  can  be  assured  of  the  result  only  by 
the  experience  of  being  god.  The  myths  of  Dionysus, 
Zagreus,  Sabazios,  Orpheus,  were  of  a  peculiarly 
savage  character;  they  told  of  a  wild  god  with  his 
train  of  followers  rushing  madly  through  forests  and 
over  mountains,  of  a  god  who  was  torn  to  pieces 
by  his  enemies  and  brought  to  life  again.  The 
saving  experience  of  godhead  was  therefore  sought 
by  going  through  what  he  did,  re-enacting  as  it 
wTere  his  tragedy.  In  these  orgies  his  devotees 
wTorked  themselves  up  to  a  pitch  of  possession — • 
enthusiasm  is  the  Greek  word — in  which  they  wTere 
invaded  by  the  god,  and,  their  own  consciousness 
being  suppressed,  they  revelled  in  the  god-conscious¬ 
ness.  Similar  phenomena  of  collective  possession 
are  not  unfamiliar  in  savage  religions  and  are  cul¬ 
tivated  for  various  ends,  but  in  the  religions  we 
are  now  considering  they  became  a  way  of  salvation 
from  the  evils  that  are  beyond  the  tomb. 

In  the  rites  of  Dionysus  or  of  Orpheus  one  of  the 
means  by  which  the  end  was  attained  was  the  rend¬ 
ing  asunder  of  the  living  body  of  an  animal  sacred 
to  the  god — in  more  primitive  conception  the  divine 
animal — drinking  its  wTarm  blood  and  devouring 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


143 


the  palpitating  flesh  in  which  was  the  life  of  the  god, 
thus  becoming  physically  partakers  of  the  divine 
nature,  as  the  savage  warrior  by  eating  the  heart 
or  the  liver  of  his  fallen  enemy  appropriates  to  him¬ 
self  the  courage  and  strength  of  his  foeman.  In 
Greece  such  orgiastic  and  cannibal  rites  were  attenu¬ 
ated  by  civilization;  but  the  enthusiasm  in  which 
man  has  the  experience  for  the  time  of  being  god, 
of  living  and  suffering  as  god,  continued  to  be  the 
earnest  of  his  immortality. 

To  such  participation  in  the  godhead  it  was  nec¬ 
essary  that  the  native  corruption  of  human  nature 
should  be  purged  away,  and  the  initiatory  rites 
took  the  form  of  purification  by  bathing  in  water, 
by  smearing  the  candidate  with  mud  and  rubbing 
it  off,  or  by  the  use  of  blood  for  the  same  pur¬ 
pose. 

Of  native  Greek  origin  were  the  mysteries  of 
Eleusis  in  Attica.  The  ancient  myth,  as  we  read 
it  in  the  Homeric  Hymn  to  Demeter,  told  of  the 
maiden  Kore  who  was  carried  off  to  the  nether  world 
by  its  sovereign,  Pluto,  of  the  inconsolable  grief  of 
her  mother,  Demeter,  and  how  she  kept  the  seed 
corn  in  the  fields  from  germinating  till  the  celestial 
gods  in  pity  intervened  and  arranged  that  Kore 
should  spend  the  winter  season  of  each  year  below, 
returning  to  the  earth  when  the  spring  flowers  bios- 


144  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


somed.  This  is  plainly  one  of  a  large  class  of  vege¬ 
tation  myths  in  which  the  wTintry  death  of  nature 
and  its  springtime  revival,  or  in  other  climates  its 
death  in  the  burning  summer  and  resurrection  in 
season  of  rains,  is  told  as  a  story  of  what  happened 
once  upon  a  time  to  persons,  divine  or  human.  So 
far  as  can  be  inferred  from  cryptic  allusions,  in  the 
celebration  in  the  great  hall  at  Eleusis  scenes  from 
the  myth  were  exhibited  to  the  mystce,  perhaps  in 
tableaux  vivants,  and — what  was  very  likely  the 
original  core  of  the  mystery — objects  that  were  once 
the  apparatus  of  magical  rites  to  make  the  crops 
grow,  now  become  symbols  of  the  mystery  faith. 
The  secrets  of  the  performance  were  well  kept,  but 
there  was  no  secret  about  their  significance.  Those 
who  had  seen  these  things  carried  away  an  assured 
hope  of  a  blessed  immortality.  There  was  no 
esoteric  doctrine;  the  initiates,  as  Aristotle  says, 
were  put  in  a  certain  frame  of  mind — we  should 
say,  they  had  a  certain  religious  experience — which 
gave  them  the  conviction  that,  like  the  grain  of 
wheat  cast  into  the  earth,  though  they  died  they 
should  live  again. 

The  Eleusinian  mysteries  were  more  decorous  than 
the  popular  Dionysiac-Orphic  orgies.  Many  of  the 
foremost  men  in  the  Greek  and  Roman  world  were 
numbered  among  their  initiates,  and  they  continued 


WAYS  OF  SALVATION 


145 


to  attract  such  even  down  to  the  end  of  the  fourth 
century  of  the  Christian  era. 

In  the  Hellenistic  and  Roman  age  other  religions 
centring  around  the  myth  of  the  god  who  had 
died  a  violent  death  and  been  brought  to  life  again 
offered  a  similar  salvation  to  those  who  in  their  way 
identified  themselves  with  the  god  in  his  death  and 
resurrection.  The  most  important  of  these  were 
the  mysteries  of  Attis,  the  beloved  of  the  great 
mother  goddess  of  Phrygia;  the  Egyptian  mysteries 
of  Isis  and  Osiris,  or  Serapis;  and  the  Syrian  mys¬ 
teries  of  Adonis,  whose  myth  resembles  that  of 
Attis.  Farther  back  in  this  line  are  the  Babylonian 
Ishtar  and  Tammuz;  but  there,  so  far  as  we  can 
see,  the  desired  end  was  magical  deliverance  from 
physical  death,  not  divine  immortality.  The  doc¬ 
trine  of  the  Mithras  mysteries  can  only  be  guessed 
at;  it  was  apparently  of  a  different  kind.  The 
salvation  it  offered  was,  however,  one  of  the  most 
popular  of  the  time. 

In  contrast  to  the  religions  of  this  life,  which  were 
the  public  affair  of  the  city  or  state,  and  of  the 
individual  as  a  member  of  the  political-religious 
community  into  which  he  was  born,  the  religions  of 
the  other  life  were  personal  concerns,  in  which  each 
man  sought  salvation  for  himself  in  the  way  in  which 
he  believed  it  was  to  be  found.  The  mysteries — 


146  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


churches  or  conventicles  we  should  call  them,  if  we 
spoke  our  own  language — were  voluntary  associations 
of  initiates,  which  sought  to  make  converts  to  their 
several  gospels,  inviting  men  to  seek  their  salvation 
in  them,  while  they  jealously  concealed  from  the  un¬ 
initiated  what  was  done  in  their  secret  assemblies. 

The  characteristic  of  this  class  of  religions  is  that 
the  assurance  of  a  blessed  immortality  is  found  in 
becoming  divine  through  union  or  identification  with 
a  divinity,  generally  one  who  on  earth  had  died 
a  violent  death  and  been  restored  to  a  deathless 
life.  The  union  is  attained  sometimes  in  enthusiasm, 
sometimes  by  sacraments,  in  which  man  becomes, 
physically  or  symbolically,  a  partaker  of  the  divine 
nature.  In  most  religions  of  the  type  both  methods 
were  employed.  Initiation  into  the  mystery  and 
participation  in  its  rites  and  experiences  was  the 
indispensable  condition  of  salvation,  originally  its 
sole  condition.  The  higher  moral  sense  of  the 
Greeks  took  offense  at  the  ignoring  of  character: 
it  was  absurd  to  think  that  a  notorious  highwayman 
went  at  death  to  everlasting  bliss  because  he  was 
initiated,  while  a  model  of  virtue  like  Epaminondas 
was  lost  because  he  was  not.  But  ethical  reflections 
of  this  kind  did  not  succeed  in  making  virtue  nec¬ 
essary  in  the  mystery  salvations.  Men  wanted 
to  take  their  assurance  unconditionally. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY 

In  India  three  ways  of  future  blessedness  are 
recognized  as  orthodox,  that  is,  as  consistent  with 
the  Veda:  The  Way  of  Works,  the  Way  of  Knowl¬ 
edge,  and  the  Way  of  Devotion.  The  first  of  these, 
the  Way  of  Works,  is  the  ancient  Vedic  doctrine 
that  by  good  works,  the  best  of  which  are  sacrifices 
to  the  gods  and  liberal  gifts  to  the  Brahman  priests, 
man  may  acquire  for  himself  a  permanent  abode  in 
the  heaven  of  the  gods  where  his  meritorious  deeds 
are  laid  up  in  store  for  him.  When  the  belief  in 
the  transmigration  of  souls,  and  rebirths  determined 
by  the  deeds  of  a  former  existence,  became  the 
nightmare  of  the  Indian  mind,  the  heaven  of  the 
gods  attained  by  sacrifice  and  prayer  and  generosity 
to  the  priests  could  no  longer  be  a  lasting  abode. 
No  deeds  could  liberate  man  from  the  law  of  the 
deed.  The  problem  which  all  the  religions  and 
philosophies  of  India  had  thenceforth  to  face  was 
not  how  man  may  earn  a  place  in  the  heaven  of  the 
gods,  but  how  he  may  escape  from  the  eternal  round 
of  predestined  rebirth. 

The  Way  of  Knowledge  offered  such  an  escape, 

147 


148  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


and,  from  the  age  of  the  Upanishads  down,  the  goal 
of  philosophy,  monist  or  dualist,  was  the  attainment 
of  the  intuitive  knowledge  which  is  liberation.  To 
this  subject  we  shall  return  in  a  subsequent  con¬ 
nection. 

Under  the  influence  of  the  new  problem,  asceticism 
took  on  a  different  significance  and  a  heightened 
value.  Bodily  privations,  self-inflicted  hardships 
and  sufferings,  appear  in  very  early  stages  of  religion, 
and  are  practised  for  various  motives.  One  of  the 
most  persistent  of  these  is  the  notion  that  endurance 
of  suffering  in  some  way  increases  power,  not  only 
what  we  should  call  natural  or  physical  power,  but 
powers  beyond  the  ordinary  measure  of  man,  and 
these  notions  survive  in  religions  higher  in  the  scale. 
They  were  long  established  and  widely  practised 
in  India. 

When  the  endless  series  of  bodily  existences  be¬ 
came  the  great  evil,  and  final  emancipation  from 
bodiliness  the  goal  of  the  seekers  of  salvation, 
asceticism  had  another  end.  The  repression  of 
the  body  with  all  its  appetites,  passions,  and  even 
its  imperative  needs,  and  the  infliction  upon  it  of 
every  kind  of  hardship,  was  not  only  an  expression 
of  contempt  for  the  flesh  but  a  means  of  reducing 
this  “not-self”  to  the  verge  of  non-existence;  for 
the  consciousness  of  the  ascetic  “It  is  not  I;  it  is 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  149 


not  mine.”  Such  maltreatment  of  the  body  was 
taken  up  also  into  the  regimen  of  the  philosophic 
life;  it  was  a  preparatory  condition  to  the  attain¬ 
ment  of  the  saving  insight  into  the  nature  of  reality. 

In  the  midst  of  all  this,  a  striking  phenomenon 
meets  us  in  the  history  of  religion  in  India,  the  rise 
and  rapid  spread  of  religions  which  not  only  rejected 
the  Vedas  and  the  Brahman  priesthood  with  their 
Way  of  Works,  but  the  Way  of  Knowledge,  the 
metaphysics  of  salvation  in  the  Upanishads  and  the 
philosophic  schools.  They  worship  no  gods,  and 
they  own  no  Lord  (personal  supreme  God);  they 
abjure  metaphysics,  and  reject  all  speculations  about 
the  Absolute  or  eternal  individual  soul-monads. 
They  undertake  to  show  a  man  what  he  must  do 
to  achieve  his  own  deliverance  from  the  round  of 
rebirth  and  its  endless  misery,  to  be  his  own  savior 
without  the  aid  of  god  or  man. 

In  the  age  and  region  in  which  these  religions 
sprung  up  individuals  were  seeking  the  solution  of 
the  problem  of  salvation  for  themselves  by  the  se¬ 
verest  asceticism,  and  by  arts  of  abstraction  and  con¬ 
centration,  the  practice  of  Yoga  in  its  contemporary 
forms,  through  which  the  experience  of  emancipation 
might  be  reached  in  this  life;  while  various  teachers 
who  professed  to  have  found  the  secret  of  deliverance 
drew  to  them  a  numerous  following  and  became 


150  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


founders  of  sects  or  orders.  In  these  circles  it  was 
the  universal  conviction  that  neither  good  works 
according  to  the  Brahmanic  conception  of  them, 
nor  religious  learning — the  knowledge  of  the  Vedas — 
can  effect  the  great  deliverance,  for  they  do  not 
touch  the  root  of  the  evil.  The  universal  law  of  the 
deed  and  its  fruit  applies  to  good  works  as  well  as 
to  bad,  and  whether  the  consequence  of  the  deed 
is  a  better  or  a  worse  lot  in  a  finite  hereafter,  man 
is  still  bound  fast  on  the  ever-revolving  wheel  of 
existence;  deliverance  is  achieved  only  when  man 
knows,  “It  cometh  not  again.” 

Among  the  sects  which  offered  themselves  as  a 
way  of  salvation  in  that  age  the  two  of  perma¬ 
nent  importance  were  the  Jains  and  the  Buddhists. 
The  former  survive  to  this  day  in  India,  but  have 
never  spread  beyond  it.  Buddhism,  on  the  con¬ 
trary,  became  the  first  great  international  religion, 
and  in  one  form  or  another  spread  over  all  Eastern 
Asia.  Its  founder,  generally  known  by  his  title, 
Buddha,  “The  Enlightened  One,”  was  born  about 
560  and  died  in  480  B.  C.  Leaving  home  and  wife 
and  child,  he  had  for  seven  years  sought  deliverance, 
first  by  the  extremest  privations,  and  then  under 
the  guidance  of  highly  esteemed  Yoga  teachers, 
but  did  not  find  it.  Finally  in  an  hour  of  pene¬ 
trating  intuition  he  discovered  the  root  of  the  evil 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  151 


and  the  way  of  release,  and  began  proclaiming  to 
others  the  fundamental  truths  and  the  method  of 
salvation. 

The  first  of  the  four  great  truths  is  the  uni¬ 
versality  of  suffering  in  this  life  and  in  the  end¬ 
less  chain  of  lives  of  which  the  present  is  only  one 
link.  Upon  that  point  all  the  seekers  of  salvation 
in  his  time  were  agreed.  The  second  truth  is  the 
origin  of  suffering  in  desire.  That  man  desires  what 
can  only  lead  to  suffering  comes  from  ignorance  of 
the  concatenation  of  desire,  purpose,  deed,  and  con¬ 
sequence.  Here  again  Buddha  was  in  accord  with 
some,  at  least,  of  his  predecessors.  The  third  of 
his  great  truths  is  that  suffering  can  only  be  ended 
by  the  extinction  of  desire  of  every  kind;  ultimately 
of  the  desire  for  life — the  will  to  be.  The  last  truth 
is  the  salutory  regimen  by  which  desire  may  be 
completely  extinguished,  the  so-called  “  eightfold 
path,”  which  leads  through  a  moral  and  intellectual 
self-discipline  to  an  inner  concentration  in  which, 
sensation,  perception,  intellection,  and  conscious¬ 
ness  itself  being  suppressed,  man  experiences  in 
foretaste  the  endless  peace.  As  in  other  contempo¬ 
rary  schools  and  sects,  this  goal  is  called  Nirvana. 

In  the  history  of  Buddhism,  Nirvana  has  had 
many  meanings,  and  we  have  no  occasion  here  to  go 
into  disputed  definitions.  It  will  suffice  for  our 


152  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


purpose  to  take  it  in  the  sense  of  the  blessed  state 
of  release  which  comes  when  the  chain  of  causation 
that  reaches  from  one  life  to  another  has  been  broken. 
Nor  need  we  dwTell  here  upon  the  peculiar  attitude 
of  Buddha  toward  the  Ego,  the  individual  self,  or 
soul,  whose  existence  he  denies — it  is  not  a  sub¬ 
stantial  soul  wThich  passes  from  one  existence  to 
another,  but  only  the  Karma  of  one  that  is  trans¬ 
mitted  to  another,  as,  to  use  his  own  figure,  one 
lamp  is  lighted  from  another,  though  neither  the 
lamp  nor  the  oil  nor  the  flame  is  the  same. 

For  the  practice  of  the  method  by  which  desire 
was  to  be  extinguished  and  Nirvana  attained, 
Buddha,  like  other  religious  teachers  of  his  time, 
established  a  mendicant  brotherhood.  Its  rule  was 
a  middle  way  between  the  extravagant  privations 
practised  by  many  and  a  life  of  self-indulgence. 
The  body  was  neither  to  be  maltreated  nor  pampered, 
since  both  extremes  are  incompatible  with  the  mental 
and  moral  discipline  through  which  the  goal  was 
to  be  reached.  It  was  impossible  to  practise  this 
discipline  while  living  the  life  of  a  householder, 
with  its  family  and  social  ties.  Only  one  who  severed 
all  such  ties  and  devoted  himself  wholly  to  the 
quest  of  salvation  could  hope  to  attain  it.  Entrance 
upon  this  way  was  by  the  profession:  “ I  take  refuge 
in  the  Buddha;  I  take  refuge  in  the  Dharma;  I 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  153 


take  refuge  in  the  Sangha” — the  Teacher,  the  Truth, 
the  Order. 

In  primitive  Buddhism,  salvation  was  thus  in 
the  strictest  sense  an  achievement  of  the  individual 
for  himself  and  by  himself.  Buddha  had  discovered 
the  way  and  taught  it  to  men;  his  disciples  repeated 
his  teachings,  and  counselled  and  exhorted  one 
another  about  the  practice  of  them;  those  who  had 
made  most  progress  were  an  example  to  the  less 
advanced;  the  rule  provided  for  a  fortnightly  gen¬ 
eral  confession  through  which  the  faults  of  the 
brethren  were  discovered  and  corrected.  But  beyond 
that  no  man  could  help  another;  even  the  Buddha 
himself  could  not.  Nor  was  there  any  god  who 
could  further  a  man  in  his  pursuit  of  salvation,  much 
less  bestow  it  upon  him. 

The  founder  was  held  in  reverent  affection  as 
the  discoverer  and  teacher  of  the  saving  truth;  but 
if  in  the  early  days  there  can  be  said  to  have  been 
any  object  of  devotion  at  all  it  was  the  Truth,  the 
Dharma,  rather  than  the  Buddha.  And  when  be¬ 
fore  long,  in  some  circles,  Buddha  came  to  be  re¬ 
garded  as  a  supernatural  being  who  had  descended 
to  the  world  from  the  Tusita  heaven  to  make  known 
to  men  the  way  of  salvation,  it  was  as  teacher,  not 
as  savior,  that  he  was  venerated.  Nor  did  the  doc¬ 
trine  which  early  emerged  in  some  circles  that  the 


154  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


Buddha  on  earth  was  above  all  the  limitations  of 
ordinary  mankind,  or  the  docetic  theory  that  his 
body  was  only  a  semblance  of  humanity  assumed 
in  his  condescension,  make  any  essential  change  in 
this  attitude.  Buddhism  made  its  founder  and  many 
of  its  saints  objects  of  worship  in  the  sense  of  vener¬ 
ation,  but  it  did  not  seek  from  them  by  this  worship 
either  the  good  things  of  this  life  or  the  supreme 
good,  deliverance  from  the  evils  of  the  beyond.  To 
make  the  former  objects  of  desire  was  in  the  act 
to  renounce  the  quest  of  salvation;  salvation  itself 
by  its  very  nature  could  not  be  bestowed  by  god 
or  man.  In  the  expansion  of  Buddhism,  like  other 
religions  under  similar  conditions,  it  took  in  with 
its  converts  such  of  the  old  gods  as  they  set  the 
greatest  store  by,  who  were  legitimized  in  the  char¬ 
acter  of  guardians  and  defenders  of  the  faith,  and 
as  such  received  religious  worship. 

Buddha  was  averse  to  all  speculation  as  vain 
and  unprofitable,  but  his  followers  could  not  per¬ 
manently  maintain  this  attitude  in  the  controversy 
with  philosophically  minded  opponents  or  in  the 
questionings  of  their  own  minds,  and  in  time  evolved 
in  their  schools  metaphysical  doctrines  of  reality — 
or  unreality — which  compete  in  abstractness  of 
content  and  subtlety  of  ratiocination  with  the 
Vedantists  themselves.  Under  the  influence  of  these 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  155 


ontological  theories,  the  conception  of  the  nature 
of  Buddha  underwent  a  transformation  somewhat 
resembling  what  Neoplatonic  thinkers  accomplished 
in  Christian  doctrine. 

Moreover,  the  goal  had  shifted  from  the  attain¬ 
ment  by  the  individual  of  the  character  of  Arhat 
(saint)  and  entrance  into  Nirvana,  to  becoming  a 
Buddha,  with  all  a  Buddha’s  essential  knowledge 
and  a  Buddha’s  mission.  But  through  all  this,  the 
achievement  was  solely  man’s  own.  It  was  “sal¬ 
vation  by  man’s  own  power.” 

Such  a  salvation  is  evidently  not  for  all.  The 
sole  hope  primitive  Buddhism  held  out  to  its  own 
lay  adherents  was  that  by  keeping  the  simple  com¬ 
mandments  for  laymen  and  by  charity  bestowed 
upon  the  mendicant  brothers  a  man  might  be  reborn 
with  a  predisposition  to  become  a  monk  and  thus 
enter  on  the  way  of  salvation,  and  be  born  in  circum¬ 
stances  that  made  it  possible  for  him  to  fulfil  this 
purpose.  What  was  true  of  Buddhism  in  this  respect 
was  true  in  one  way  or  another  of  all  the  orthodoxies 
and  heresies  of  the  age;  to  those  who  were  not  able 
by  renunciation,  by  transcendental  knowledge,  by 
extinction  of  desire,  to  save  themselves,  they  had 
nothing  to  offer. 

It  is  easy  to  see,  therefore,  what  an  attraction 
for  the  masses  of  men  religions  possessed  which 


156  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


offered  the  assurance  of  salvation  on  more  practicable 
terms;  the  religions  which  it  is  customary  to  group 
together  under  the  vague  name  Hinduism.  As 
natural  religions  their  history  doubtless  goes  very 
far  back,  but  when  they  emerge  upon  our  knowledge 
they  had  already  taken  for  their  sphere  the  life  that 
is  to  come  as  well  as  that  that  now  is.  Two  such 
religions  have  outgrown  all  others,  or  to  speak  more 
exactly,  have  absorbed  all  the  rest,  and  between 
them  divide  the  faith  and  hope  of  the  millions  of 
India.  The  supreme  god  of  one  of  them  is  Vishnu, 
of  the  other  Shiva.  As  natural  religions  they  grew 
up  in  different  regions  of  India,  and  even  to-day  are 
unequally  distributed  over  the  peninsula.  The 
stamp  of  their  natural  origin  remains  ineffaceable, 
and  in  many  respects  they  are  widely  diverse. 
Their  intrinsic  differences  are  multiplied  by  the 
innumerable  sects  to  which  each  of  them  has  given 
birth.  They  are,  however,  fundamentally  alike  in 
character  with  which  we  are  here  concerned:  in 
both  of  them  man  seeks  salvation  and  deliverance 
by  devotion  to  a  savior  god.  This  is  the  third  of 
the  ways  of  salvation  which,  as  we  have  seen,  the 
native  analysis  distinguishes,  the  Bhakti  Marga. 

Bhakti,  the  specific  difference  of  these  religions, 
is  faith;  they  are  religions  of  salvation  by  faith. 
As  in  other  religions  of  this  type,  “ faith”  compre- 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  157 


hends  in  varying  proportions  belief,  trust,  and  re¬ 
sponsive  affection,  which  may  rise  to  mystical  ex¬ 
altation.  The  emotional  element  is  especially  con¬ 
spicuous  in  the  religion  of  Vishnu.  This  god — the 
supreme  god  of  the  religion — has  from  age  to  age, 
when  the  need  of  the  times  was  greatest,  become 
incarnate  and  appeared  on  earth  as  a  man;  and  it 
is  to  these  Avatars  (“descents”)  of  Vishnu,  espe¬ 
cially  to  his  incarnations,  Krishna  and  Rama,  that 
the  faith  and  love  of  his  followers  is  chiefly  directed. 
The  motive  of  these  incarnations  is  the  compassion 
of  God  with  men  and  his  desire  to  save  them;  and 
those  who  put  their  trust  in  him  and  show  devotion 
to  him  in  their  lives  he  delivers  from  the  law  of 
rebirth  and  takes  to  be  with  him  in  the  endless  bliss 
of  his  heaven. 

In  Buddhism  itself  a  corresponding  evolution  took 
place  in  what  are  called  the  Pure  Land  (or  Happy 
Land)  sects.  One  of  the  early  Japanese  exponents 
of  this  doctrine  reasoned  thus:  In  ancient  times, 
when  men  were  stronger  and  better  than  they  are 
now,  they  were  able  to  achieve  salvation  by  their 
own  power,  walking  in  the  Holy  Way;  but  in  these 
degenerate  days  few,  if  any,  are  capable  of  attaining 
it  thus.  If,  therefore,  the  great  mass  of  mankind 
are  not  to  be  helplessly  and  hopelessly  lost,  salvation 
must  be  extended  to  them  “  by  the  power  of  another.” 


158  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


Such  a  salvation  is  provided  by  Amitabha  Buddha, 
who  ages  ago  vowed  that  he  would  not  himself  enter 
into  the  bliss  of  attainment  unless  every  man  who 
in  devout  faith  called  upon  his  name  might  be  saved. 
Those  who,  putting  their  confidence  in  this  vow, 
thus  call  upon  Amitabha  are  received  by  him  into 
the  Western  Paradise,  the  realm  of  endless  light, 
where  they  progress  to  perfection  in  knowledge  and 
character.  Here,  again,  religion,  in  despair  of  man’s 
ability  to  save  himself,  turns  as  its  only  hope  to 
the  grace  of  God — for  a  god  in  everything  but  the 
word,  Amitabha  is — through  faith.  When  the  Jesuit 
missionaries  first  made  acquaintance  of  Japan  they 
recognized  in  the  Shingon,  the  ritualist  high  church 
of  Japanese  Buddhism,  a  diabolic  travesty  of  their 
own  liturgy;  and  discovered  that  the  devil  had  done 
them  another  ill  turn  by  planting  the  Lutheran 
heresy  of  salvation  by  faith  alone  in  Japan  to  con¬ 
front  them  on  their  arrival. 

From  the  dawn  of  philosophy  it  has  addressed 
itself  to  problems  with  which  religion  w^as  concerned. 
Speaking  generally,  we  may  say  that  its  endeavor 
was  to  put  a  rational  theory  in  the  place  of  mythical 
explanations  of  the  world,  its  origin,  and  its  working; 
a  valid  physical  or  metaphysical  conception  of  reality 
and  the  ground  of  being  in  place  of  naive  assump- 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  159 


tions;  a  rational  and  moral  idea  of  God  in  place  of 
popular  notions  which  were  neither;  a  rational  ethics 
in  place  of  a  customary  morality.  Nowhere  is  this 
characteristic  of  philosophy  more  conspicuous  than 
in  its  endeavor  to  solve  the  problem  of  salvation, 
when  it  had  once  been  raised.  In  all  ages  and  climes, 
philosophic  conceptions  have  either  given  a  dis¬ 
tinctive  character  to  the  religion  of  thinking  men, 
or  have  enabled  them  to  satisfy  their  religious  needs 
outside  the  traditional  religion  of  their  surrounding. 
It  is  proper,  therefore,  to  conclude  this  survey  of 
soteric  religions  with  a  glance  at  philosophy  as  a 
way  of  salvation. 

Philosophy  began,  in  India  as  well  as  in  Greece, 
with  the  problems  of  the  physical  universe — cosmo¬ 
logical  problems  to  which  theology  had  led  the  way. 
The  reality  of  the  material  universe  and  of  the  change 
which  is  its  unchanging  character  was  assumed. 
Sooner  or  later,  however,  thinking  was  sure  to  raise 
the  question,  What  is  the  nature  of  reality?  and 
thus  to  turn  to  the  problems  of  ontology,  or  meta¬ 
physics.  In  India  this  current  of  thinking  is  in 
full  tide  in  the  Upanishads.  The  doctrine  which 
there  prevails  is  that  there  is  but  one  reality,  to 
which  the  name  Brahman  is  given.  For  this  meta¬ 
physics  Brahman  is  pure  being,  simple  unity  which 
excludes  all  duality,  even  that  of  subject  and  object 


160  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


in  consciousness.  As  pure  intelligence  it  is  immate¬ 
rial;  as  self-sufficient  it  is  perfect  bliss.  The  soul 
or  self  of  man  ( atman )  is  not  only  of  the  same 
nature,  but  is  the  same  identical  reality.  Individ¬ 
uality  is  the  great  error,  and  the  cause  of  all  man’s 
ills;  for  by  it  man  goes  from  death  to  another  life 
and  so  on,  as  long  as  he  cherishes  the  illusion  of 
separate  selfhood.  Salvation,  therefore,  is  possible 
only  through  the  overcoming  of  this  illusion,  and 
the  recognition  of  the  truth,  to  put  it  in  personal 
form,  that  I — or  what  mistakes  itself  for  I — is 
nothing  else  than  the  one  reality  itself,  and  not 
another.  When  the  self  that  dreams  itself  finite 
and  individual  realizes  that  it  is  the  infinite  Self, 
the  one  and  all,  then,  “it  cometh  not  again.” 
Formulas  for  this  doctrine  are  “the  non-duality  of 
Brahman,”  or,  in  another  phrase,  “  That  (namely 
Brahman)  art  thou” 

This  transcendental  knowledge  is  not  a  doctrine 
that  can  be  learned  and  taken  on  the  authority  of 
a  teacher,  or  reached  by  way  of  demonstration,  or 
accepted  on  the  ground  of  its  self-evidence.  If  it  is 
ever  attained,  it  comes  as  an  intuition  which  brings 
its  certainty  in  itself.  Moral  excellence,  ascetic 
exercises,  reflection,  contemplation  carried  to  and 
beyond  the  limits  of  consciousness,  are  only  means 
by  which  a  man  may  put  himself  in  a  state  in  which 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  161 


this  transcendent  intuition  is  possible.  Here,  again, 
the  attainment  is  man’s  own;  the  impassive  Brah¬ 
man  has  nothing  to  do  with  it. 

The  question  was  bound  to  arise,  however,  if 
Brahman  is  the  sole  reality,  one,  immaterial,  change¬ 
less,  what  is  this  manifold  changing  material  world 
which  we  perceive  by  our  senses;  or,  to  put  the 
question  more  properly,  whence  arises  the  fatal 
illusion  that  there  is  such  a  world  of  objects  and 
phenomena,  the  illusion  that  I,  who  am  not  I,  am 
aware  of  a  world  that  is  not  a  world.  Where  is 
the  seat  of  this  illusion?  If  there  be  nothing  but 
Brahman,  then  the  illusion  must  be  lodged  in  it. 
Into  this  apparent  self-contradiction,  and  the  way 
in  which  Shankara  sought  to  extricate  himself  from 
it  and  to  reconcile  his  idealistic  monism  with  its 
Absolute  of  which  nothing  can  be  said  except  “neti, 
neti ” — “it  is  nothing  that  can  be  thought  of  it” — 
with  other  parts  of  the  Scriptures  in  which  the 
reality  of  the  phenomenal  universe  is  assumed,  and 
Brahman  is  regarded  as  the  ground,  source,  or  author 
of  it,  we  need  not  here  enter,  being  concerned  with 
this  philosophy  as  a  way  of  salvation  and  not  as  a 
system  of  metaphysics.  Multitudes  in  India,  from 
the  time  of  the  L^panishads  down,  have  sought  and 
found  assurance  of  deliverance  in  the  experience  of 
identity  of  self  with  the  Over-Self.  Like  similar 


162  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


philosophies  in  the  West  it  is  a  lofty  mysticism  of 
purely  intellectual  type. 

Few  men  are  capable  of  breathing  the  rarefied 
atmosphere  of  such  empyrean  heights.  Much  easier 
for  the  ordinary  mind  is  some  form  of  pantheistic 
conception  in  which  the  soul  of  man  is  an  efflux  or 
a  particle  of  the  universal  soul,  with  which  it  is 
reunited  after  death,  preserving  consciousness,  or 
in  which  it  is  absorbed  at  death,  merging  conscious¬ 
ness.  And  in  India,  as  elsewhere,  men  have  found 
no  insuperable  difficulty  in  personifying  the  All, 
and  converting  their  pantheism  into  a  species  of 
theism.  One  great  school,  which,  in  opposition  to 
Shankara,  claims  to  be  the  true  interpreter  of  the 
Vedanta,  makes  of  Brahman — identified  with  Vishnu 
and  Narayana — a  gracious  supreme  god,  object  of 
man’s  love  and  devotion,  by  whose  grace  he  is  saved ; 
approximating  thus  in  a  lofty  religious  philosophy 
the  popular  forms  of  Hinduism  of  which  we  have 
already  spoken. 

In  an  atmosphere  of  metaphysics  such  as  that  of 
intellectual  India  in  the  centuries  that  followed  the 
foundation  of  Buddhism,  some  Buddhist  schools 
appropriated  in  different  ways  an  absolute  ontology 
whose  filiation  with  the  Vedanta  is  unmistakable. 
Of  this  absolute  “Suchness”  ( thathata )  not  only 
Gautama,  whom  we  call  the  historical  Buddha,  but 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  163 


innumerable  Buddhas  in  all  the  infinite  aeons  of 
time  and  all  the  regions  of  7z-dimensional  space  are 
in  some  wav  manifestations.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  Buddha  nature  is  in  all  men,  and  the  realization 
of  this  potentiality  is  the  sublime  goal  toward  which 
the  seeker  ( Bodhisattva )  presses  through  existence 
after  existence  until  the  perfection  of  character  and 
knowledge  is  attained.  In  the  various  systems  of 
the  Mahayana,  therefore,  the  end  set  before  the 
Buddhist  is  not  cessation — Nirvana  in  the  original 
sense — the  cessation  of  desire  and  with  it  the  end¬ 
ing  of  the  bond  between  the  doer  and  his  deed,  the 
deliverance  from  rebirth;  what  man  now  strives  for 
is  to  realize  in  himself  the  infinite  intelligence  and 
goodness  of  the  Buddha  nature  which  is  potential 
in  all  men,  and  to  become  in  some  future  existence 
a  Buddha  and  the  savior  of  all  sentient  beings. 

A  rival  of  the  Yedantin  monism  which  for  a  time 
seriously  contested  the  field  with  it  was  the  dualistic 
system  of  the  Sankhya.  For  it,  there  was  “nature” 
( PraJcriti ),  matter  charged  with  energy,  eternally 
active,  composite,  ceaselessly  changing,  and  “selves” 
( Purusha ),  eternal,  individual,  immaterial,  simple, 
passive  monads;  unchanging  in  themselves  and 
untouched  by  anything  that  goes  on  in  “nature.” 
To  “nature”  belongs  the  psychical  apparatus  of 
thinking,  feeling,  willing,  and  all  its  products.  The 


164  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


fatal  error  of  man  is  that  he  imagines  that  his  self 
is  affected  by  the  changeful  activity  of  nature — that 
it  is  his  self  that  enjoys  or  suffers,  as  if  a  crystal 
vase  should  imagine  that  the  red  image  of  a  hibiscus 
flower  thrown  upon  it  was  a  redness  in  itself.  So 
long  as  this  illusion  lasts,  the  self  is  involved  in  the 
round  of  rebirth  and  all  its  misery.  Deliverance  is 
the  recognition  of  the  complete  independence  of  the 
self,  its  individual  absoluteness. 

We  have  already  seen  that  in  Greece  as  well  as 
in  India  the  doctrine  of  metempsychosis  was  taken 
up  in  the  philosophy  of  the  Pythagorean  school  and 
by  Plato.  In  both,  the  soul,  a  divine  nature,  is 
in  the  world  here  below  and  in  a  body  of  gross 
matter  as  the  consequence  of  a  fall.  The  soul  brings 
with  it  into  this  earthly  existence  reminiscences  of 
its  native  state,  wherein  lies  the  possibility  of  rousing 
it  to  an  aspiration  to  regain  it.  The  body  shares 
the  impurity  of  matter,  and  to  keep  the  soul  from 
defilement  by  this  contaminating  contact  and  to 
clarify  the  intellect  by  philosophy  is  the  only  way 
to  hasten  its  release. 

The  fall  of  souls  and  their  fortunes  in  successive 
embodiments  was  conceived  in  the  form  of  myth, 
and  this  form  is  preserved  in  Plato,  with  whom, 
however,  myth  is  the  transparent  vestment  of  much 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  165 


more  profound  ideas.  We  have  already  noticed 
that  for  him  the  fall  is  not  an  unimaginable  crime — 
bloodshed  or  perjury — in  the  celestial  realm,  as  in 
Empedocles.  As  appears  most  clearly  in  the  myth 
of  the  charioteer  and  his  pair  of  winged  steeds  in 
the  Phsedrus,  the  disaster  comes  from  the  driver’s 
failure  to  control  the  unruly  beast — that  is,  the  fail¬ 
ure  of  the  intellect  to  master  the  soul’s  lower  im¬ 
pulses. 

The  great  contribution  of  Plato  to  philosophy  is 
the  idea  of  immaterial  reality,  which  had  its  origin 
in  Pythagorean  observations  on  the  reality  of  the 
properties  of  numbers  and  geometrical  forms  on 
the  one  side,  and  in  the  Socratic  theory  of  the  reality 
of  ethical  universals  on  the  other,  and  wTas  developed 
in  the  doctrine  of  ideas.  To  this  realm  belong  the 
intellect  of  man,  as  well  as  the  supreme  intellect, 
the  6dos  vovs.  Both  are  by  nature  eternal  in  past 
and  future;  the  human  soul  eternally  individual. 
God  is  not  only  pure  intelligence  but  perfect  good¬ 
ness,  the  very  idea  of  the  Good;  and  to  regain  his 
native  high  estate  man  must  not  merely  purge  his 
intellect  of  all  the  illusions  of  error,  but  strive  to 
achieve  likeness  to  God  in  character.  Only  thus 
can  he  realize  his  true  nature  and  destiny  wherein 
is  man’s  highest  good,  his  perfect  and  eternal  well¬ 
being. 


166  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


Platonism  in  this  aspect  is  a  way  of  salvation 
like  the  great  Indian  philosophies.  But  whereas  the 
latter  are  fundamentally  ontological — comprehending 
in  that  word  their  metaphysical  psychology — and 
salvation  is  achieved  by  the  intuitive  apprehension 
of  the  relation  of  the  soul  to  the  changeless  Absolute, 
or  to  multitudinous  and  changeful  nature  ( Prakriti ) 
— morality,  and  that  of  a  conventional  type,  being 
no  more  than  a  condition  precedent  to  that  attain¬ 
ment — to  the  Greek,  ethics  is  an  integral  part  of 
philosophy;  the  practice  of  virtue  is  an  imitation 
of  God  and  a  transfiguration  into  his  image.  Real¬ 
ized  salvation  is  perfect  likeness  to  God,  who  is 
himself  the  projection  into  the  infinite  of  the  highest 
ethical  ideals  of  man. 

There  is  an  ascetic  note  in  Plato,  as  in  every 
idealist  philosophy.  The  soul,  rising  superior  to 
the  deceptions  of  the  senses  and  the  seductions 
of  the  appetites,  emancipating  itself  from  subjection 
to  the  body,  must  collect  itself,  and,  so  far  as  it  can, 
live  by  itself.  This  liberation  makes  man,  even  on 
earth,  divine  and  immortal.  The  philosopher’s  flight 
from  the  world  is  the  putting  on  of  the  likeness  of 
God;  and  when  such  a  one  is  finally  released  from 
mortal  existence,  the  pure  soul  ascends  to  be  forever 
with  God. 

This  doctrine  attained  its  ultimate  form  in  ancient 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  167 


philosophy  in  Plotinus.  On  the  one  hand  he  pushed 
the  transcendence  of  the  unity  of  which  Plato  him¬ 
self  had  said  that  it  is  beyond  knowledge  and  beyond 
being,  to  its  extreme  consequence  in  an  Absolute  to 
which  even  self-consciousness  must  be  denied.  On 
the  other  hand,  he  endeavors  to  overcome  the  dual¬ 
ism  of  Plato,  who  posited  an  eternal  primordial 
matter,  and  to  derive  the  material  universe,  with 
its  manifoldness  and  perpetual  change,  from  the 
unchanging  One.  And  in  the  third  place,  in  ac¬ 
cordance  with  the  general  trend  of  philosophical 
and  religious  thinking  in  his  time,  he  went  far  beyond 
Plato  in  conceiving  the  world  of  matter  and  sense 
as  inherently  evil  not  only  physically  but  morally. 

Premising  so  much  about  the  conditions  of  the 
problem  as  it  presented  itself  to  Plotinus,  we  may 
turn  to  the  religious  side  of  his  philosophy.* 

The  soul  is  by  nature  divine,  of  the  same  essence 
with  deity;  its  fall  is  its  desire  to  be  something  for 
itself,  through  which  it  forgets  its  father,  God,  and 
its  own  true  nature;  rejoicing  in  the  exercise  of  its 
free  will,  it  strays  so  far  that  it  loses  the  conscious¬ 
ness  of  its  origin,  “as  children  early  torn  from  their 
parents  and  brought  up  for  a  long  time  away  from 
them  do  not  know  either  who  they  are  or  who  their 

*  In  the  follovring  paragraphs  I  have  reproduced  in  part 
the  summary  of  the  teaching  of  Plotinus  from  my  Metempsy¬ 
chosis  (1914). 


168  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


parents  were.”  The  double  error  of  the  soul  is 
overvaluing  earthly  things  and  disprizing  itself. 
But  if  it  can  be  brought  to  see  the  worthlessness 
of  the  things  it  esteems  above  itself,  and  to  recog¬ 
nize  its  origin  and  worth,  it  has  in  itself  the  power 
of  recovery.  For,  as  Plotinus  expresses  it,  aour 
soul  did  not  wholly  descend  into  the  world  of  sense, 
but  somewhat  of  it  ever  abides  in  the  intelligible 
world.”  To  that  world  it  may  mount  up  again, 
and  dispelling  the  illusion  of  the  separate  self-con¬ 
sciousness,  “ceasing  to  draw  a  line  around  itself  to 
divide  itself  from  universal  reality,  will  come  to  the 
absolute  whole,  not  by  advancing  somewhither,  but 
by  abiding  in  that  whereon  the  whole  is  based.” 

But  there  are  heights  above  even  the  unity  of 
intelligence;  above  the  vision  of  an  intelligence  that 
is  master  of  its  faculties  there  is  the  intuition  of 
an  intelligence  in  love.  Bereft  of  its  faculties  by 
the  intoxication  of  the  nectar,  “it  is  reduced  by 
love  to  that  simple  unity  of  being  wThich  is  the 
perfect  satisfaction  of  our  souls.”  Of  this  final 
state  of  blessedness  the  soul  has  a  foretaste  and 
earnest  here  in  moments  of  ecstasy. 

We  have  seen  how  the  soul  may  reascend  to  its 
source;  but  there  is  also  a  downward  way,  in  which 
the  soul  may  lose  the  dim  consciousness  of  its  origin 

4 

which  man  retains,  and  thus  sink  to  the  level  of  the 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  169 


irrational  animals  or  even  to  the  purely  vegetative 
life  of  plants. 

Over  against  all  these  transcendental  philosophies 
with  their  immaterial  souls  fallen  from  their  high 
estate,  incarcerated  or  entombed  in  fleshly  bodies 
and  subject  to  all  the  evils  of  this  material  world, 
the  Stoics  maintained  a  physical  theology  of  im¬ 
manence.  The  universe  was  permeated  in  every 
part  and  particle  by  a  divine  intelligence,  purposeful 
and  active,  which  was  at  the  same  time  the  all- 
pervasive  energy  that  wrought  all  changes  from 
within.  This  energetic  intelligence,  which  is  in  the 
universe  as  the  soul  is  in  the  body  of  man,  they 
called  Reason  (Logos).  The  soul  of  man  is  of  the 
same  nature;  it  is  in  fact  a  particle  of  the  univer¬ 
sal  soul,  and  is  called  by  the  same  name,  Logos. 
Neither  in  the  world  nor  in  man  is  the  Logos  imma¬ 
terial — how  could  an  immaterial  anything  move 
matter?  It  is  itself  merely  the  subtlest  form  of 
matter,  which  with  the  older  physicists  they  recog¬ 
nized  in  heat,  or  “fire.” 

The  well-being  of  man  is  founded  in  a  life  con¬ 
formed  to  nature — the  nature  of  man  and  the  nature 
of  the  universe,  which  are  the  same.  As  the  im¬ 
manent  divine  reason  is  the  ruling  principle  in  the 
universe,  so  the  human  reason  is  the  ruling  faculty 
in  man.  To  recognize  this  and  to  realize  it  by 


170  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


making  reason  constantly  prevail  over  the  impulses 
of  the  senses,  the  appetites  and  passions,  is  the 
meaning  and  end  of  the  philosophic  life. 

The  chief  sphere  of  this  endeavor  is  not  to  solve 
the  metaphysical  problems  of  the  universe,  but  to 
live  a  wisely  ordered  life.  Ethics  is  the  culminating 
discipline  of  the  Stoic  system,  to  which  logic  and 
physics  (of  which  theology  is  a  subdivision)  are 
subsidiarv.  The  attainment  is  “  virtue,”  which  is 
the  highest  good,  the  only  real  good.  As  such  it 
must  be  sought  for  its  own  sake — virtue  is  not  virtue 
when  it  is  made  a  means  to  anything  else — and  it 
is  its  own  all-sufficing  reward. 

The  later  Stoicism,  as  we  know  it  in  the  Roman 
period,  became  more  theistic.  Man  not  only  imi¬ 
tated  God  by  cultivating  the  same  perfections,  but 
communed  in  spirit  with  God,  who  is  no  remote 
being  on  the  confines  of  the  universe  behind  the 
outmost  sphere,  but  is  around  us  on  every  hand  and 
within  us.  It  wTas  not  in  the  temple  and  at  the  ear 
of  the  image  that  man  conversed  with  God;  God 
is  a  holy  spirit  dwelling  in  man’s  own  soul. 

To  men  wdio  thought  and  felt  thus;  to  whom  bodily 
evils  w~ere  no  evils,  but  if  rightly  understood  a 
divinely  appointed  discipline  of  character;  to  whom 
the  wffiole  ordering  of  life  and  history  wTas  a  divine 
providence  at  once  wise  and  good,  salvation — if  wre 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  171 


may  use  that  word — was  a  present  progressive  real¬ 
ity,  and  what  was  after  death  was  of  inferior  concern. 
Whether  the  souls  of  the  wise  alone  survived  as 
individual  souls;  or  whether  all  souls  survived  until 
the  next  world  conflagration;  or  whether  at  death 
all  souls  returned  into  the  universal  soul  of  which 
they  were  but  detached  parts — on  these  points  Stoic 
teachers  were  not  agreed;  but  they  would  all  have 
agreed  in  the  words  of  Socrates:  “No  evil  can  befall 
a  good  man,  either  in  life  or  death.”  The  law  of 
nature  is  the  divine  law  of  reason,  and  violation  or 
neglect  of  it  is  revolt  against  nature,  that  is  against 
God.  Wrong-doing  in  this  light  assumes  the  charac¬ 
ter  of  sin,  a  conception  of  it  to  which  the  Stoics  first 
gave  full  significance  in  ancient  philosophy.  Self- 
examination  became  an  important  part  of  the  Stoic 
self-discipline;  by  it  men  sought  to  recognize  and 
correct  their  faults. 

As  compared  with  the  mysteries  which  offered 
themselves  as  ways  of  salvation  by  orgies  and  en¬ 
thusiastic  experiences  or  by  initiations  and  sacra¬ 
ments,  the  superiority  of  these  philosophies  lay  not 
alone  in  their  rationality  but  even  more  in  their 
essentially  ethical  character.  They  were  in  fact 
for  centuries  the  religion  of  multitudes  of  high- 
minded  men,  who  found  in  them  not  only  the  as¬ 
surance  of  the  hereafter  but  communion  with  God 


172  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


here  and  ideals  and  motives  of  human  life.  If  such 
men  were  initiated  into  the  mysteries,  they  found 
in  the  rites  the  ideas  they  brought  with  them  and 
the  experience  they  sought,  as  similar  converts  to 
Christianity  interpreted  its  [epos  X070?,  its  teaching, 
and  its  sacraments  ( fivarr/pLa ),  in  accord  with  their 
own  thinking,  and  were  furthered  in  it  by  them. 

Christianity,  after  a  long  struggle,  triumphed 
politically  over  the  public  religions  of  the  Roman 
empire,  and  suppressed  them.  As  a  way  of  salvation 
it  superseded  all  the  mysteries  and  philosophies. 
Its  success  in  this  sphere  is  historically  explained  by 
the  fact  that  catholic  Christianity  was  a  synthesis 
in  which  all  the  higher  aspirations  and  endeavors  of 
the  Mediterranean  area  for  long  centuries  was  uni¬ 
fied — the  religious  legacy  of  the  ancient  world  to 
the  ages  that  were  to  come.  A  word  may  therefore 
appropriately  be  said  here  in  conclusion  about  this 
synthesis. 

Christianity  proclaimed  itself  among  the  Gentiles 
as  a  religion  of  the  other  world,  in  forms  which 
must  everywhere  have  been  recognized  as  those  of 
a  mystery,  and  this  aspect  of  its  gospel  has  been 
greatly  emphasized  in  recent  times.  It  was,  how¬ 
ever,  fundamentally  different  from  the  current  mys¬ 
teries. 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  173 


The  mysteries,  Greek  or  Oriental,  concerned  them¬ 
selves  solely  with  the  other  life;  in  principle  they 
left  this  world  and  all  its  interests  to  the  gods  of  the 
public  religions,  however  initiates  may  have  be¬ 
lieved  that  a  deity  like  Isis  showed  peculiar  favor 
to  her  devotees  in  this  life  also.  Nor  had  the 
mysteries  any  ethical  character;  they  had  in  them¬ 
selves  no  moral  standards  and  no  moral  sanctions. 

In  Christianity,  on  the  contrary,  the  fundamental 
article  is  faith  in  the  one  God,  creator  and  ruler  of 
heaven  and  earth,  an  omnipresent,  omniscient,  om¬ 
nipotent  God,  who  by  his  will  orders  all  things  in 
nature  or  history  and  whose  providence  comprehends 
every  creature.  He  made  man  in  his  own  image, 
endowed  with  reason  and  freedom,  and  requires  of 
him  conformity  to  his  own  character.  He  has  im¬ 
planted  the  moral  law  in  the  common  conscience  of 
mankind,  and  has  made  known  his  will  more  partic¬ 
ularly  by  revelation  in  the  Scriptures  of  the  Old 
Testament.  Neglect  or  transgression  of  this  law 
is  sin,  and  by  this  standard  all  men  have  sinned  and 
come  short  of  the  glory  of  God.  In  his  dealings 
with  sinful  men  in  this  life  God  is  just  and  merciful, 
and  endeavors  by  the  exhibition  of  both  aspects  of 
his  character  to  bring  men  to  repentance,  that  is, 
to  a  transformation  of  motive  and  a  reformation  of 
conduct — the  dominance  of  love  to  God  and  love 


174  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


to  men,  and  the  kind  of  life  that  springs  from  them. 
God  is  perfectly  good,  and  his  end  in  all  his  relations 
with  men  is  their  temporal  and  eternal  well-being, 
which  in  a  moral  universe  is  only  possible  through 
righteousness  and  goodness. 

Man  is  immortal,  and  character  with  its  conse¬ 
quences  endures  beyond  the  tomb  and  there  becomes 
final.  The  judgment  of  God  separates  the  righteous 
and  the  wicked,  the  one  to  everlasting  blessedness, 
the  other  to  misery. 

All  this  is  the  direct  inheritance  of  Christianity 
from  Judaism,  and  upon  this  foundation  all  the  rest 
is  based.  The  Synagogue  in  the  dispersion  had 
made  the  essentials  of  this  theology  widely  known; 
its  ethical  monotheism  fell  in  with  a  strong  current 
of  popular  philosophy  and  commended  it  to  many, 
some  of  wThom  became  proselytes,  while  a  larger 
number  appropriated  the  ideas  without  formally 
addicting  themselves  to  the  religion  and  being 
naturalized  in  the  Jewish  people  whose  religion  it 
’was. 

The  specific  difference  of  Christianity  is  faith  in 
Jesus  Christ.  For  the  immediate  disciples  of  Jesus 
this  meant  the  belief  that  he  was  the  Messiah  wThom 
the  Jews  had  so  long  expected.  His  death  was  not 
the  refutation  of  this  claim  but  the  proof  of  it. 
God  had  raised  him  from  the  dead  and  taken  him 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  175 


up  to  heaven,  whence  he  was  presently  to  come  as 
the  judge  in  the  great  assize,  in  which  those  who  had 
rejected  him,  with  all  the  wicked,  would  be  con¬ 
demned.  The  name  Christianity,  however,  properly 
belongs  to  the  form  which  this  belief  attained  as 
it  spread  beyond  the  pale  of  Judaism.  There  the 
fundamental  article  of  the  distinctively  Christian 
faith  was  that  Jesus  wTas  not  only  the  Messiah  pre¬ 
dicted  in  the  prophets,  but  a  supernatural  being, 
a  son  of  God,  who  came  from  heaven  to  suffer  and 
die,  and  by  his  death  and  resurrection  triumph  over 
death,  not  for  himself  alone  but  for  all  wdio  wTere 
united  to  him  by  faith,  were  initiated  into  his 
mystical  body,  the  church,  and  participated  in  itrj 
sacraments.  The  affinity  of  these  ideas  to  the 
mysteries  is  evident.  Like  them,  also,  Christianity 
was  a  way  of  salvation  for  all  men,  without  dis¬ 
tinction  of  race,  condition,  or  religion — “Jew  or 
Greek,  barbarian,  Scythian,  bond  or  free.” 

But  the  differences  are  no  less  significant.  In 
the  mysteries  the  death  of  the  Saviour  was  in 
itself  meaningless — an  incident  of  savage  myth. 
The  restoration  to  life,  henceforth  an  immortal 
life,  was  the  one  essential  thing,  because  the  evil 
to  be  overcome,  mortality,  was  a  limitation  of 
human  nature  which  was  transcended  by  partici¬ 
pation  in  a  divine  nature.  For  Paul,  on  the  con- 


176  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


trary,  to  whom  as  a  Jew  the  hindrance  to  a  blessed 
hereafter  under  the  moral  government  of  God  was 
sin,  the  death  of  Christ  was  an  expiation  for  the 
sins  of  all  mankind.  But  an  even  more  fundamental 
difference  is  that  in  Christianity  God  himself  is  the 
author  of  salvation.  In  his  limitless  love  to  men 
he  sent  his  Son  from  heaven  to  become  man,  to  die 
for  men’s  sins,  and  by  his  resurrection  to  open  for 
them  the  way  to  eternal  blessedness.  A  soteriology 
whose  analogies  are  primarily  un- Jewish  was  thus 
incorporated  in  a  theology  essentially  Jewish,  with 
the  consequence,  as  we  have  seen  in  Paul’s  doctrine 
of  redemption  from  sin,  that  the  Christian  salvation 
has  an  imperatively  ethical  character  which  is 
wholly  foreign  to  the  mysteries.  But  while  in 
Judaism,  as  Paul  represents  it,  righteousness  ac¬ 
cording  to  the  standard  of  the  divine  law  is  the 
indispensable — and  impossible — condition  of  salva¬ 
tion,  in  Christianity  a  character  conformed  to  God’s 
own  is  the  consequence  of  the  grace  of  God  in  Jesus 
Christ,  through  the  Holy  Spirit.  The  possession  of 
such  a  character  is  therefore  the  criterion  of  the 
genuineness  of  man’s  faith  and  the  reality  of  his 
union  with  Christ. 

The  “Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ”  was  in  the 
earliest  Christology  a  divine  being,  the  Son  of  God. 
Aside  from  the  mythological  misconceptions  to 


SALVATION:  RELIGION  AND  PHILOSOPHY  177 


which  such  a  phrase  was  exposed,  the  conception 
itself  seemed  to  collide  with  the  emphatic  mono¬ 
theism  which  was  the  corner-stone  of  Christian  faith, 
and  this  difficulty  was  greatly  increased  when,  as 
immediately  ensued,  cosmic  functions,  including  the 
creation  of  the  world,  were  attributed  to  him.  The 
effort  to  avoid  this  conflict  in  some  of  the  epistles 
of  Paul  shows  how^  soon  the  consciousness  of  it 
came.  A  somewhat  similar  problem  had  arisen  in 
a  different  way  in  Hellenistic  Judaism  itself,  and 
Philo  had  found  a  solution  in  the  doctrine  of  the 
divine  Logos.  The  beginnings  of  Christian  philoso¬ 
phizing  followed  substantially  the  same  line.  Like 
Philo,  their  philosophy  was  a  diluted  Platonism, 
with  Pythagorean  leanings,  and  considerable  appro¬ 
priations  from  Stoicism  not  only  on  the  ethical  but 
on  the  theological  side. 

When  Origen  addressed  himself  to  the  construction 
of  a  system  of  Christian  theology,  or  more  exactly 
a  speculative  philosophy  of  the  Christian  religion, 
the  philosophy  was  Platonism  in  the  ultimate  stage 
of  its  development  as  it  has  been  described  above 
in  speaking  of  Plotinus.  Though  many  things  in 
Origen’s  imposing  construction  were  rejected  by 
the  church  as  at  variance  with  Scripture  and  tra¬ 
dition,  as  the  whole  system  of  his  great  predecessor 
Valentinus  had  been,  Platonism  remained  what  may 


178  THE  BIRTH  AND  GROWTH  OF  RELIGION 


be  called  the  orthodox  philosophy  of  the  church, 
and  this  position  was  confirmed  in  the  West  by  the 
great  influence  of  Augustine. 

Historical  Christianity  is  therefore  a  cord  of  three 
strands,  Jewish  ethical  monotheism;  Hellenistic 
soteriology,  profoundly  modified  by  the  Jewish  ele¬ 
ment;  and  Greek  philosophy,  which  not  only  con¬ 
stituted  the  formal  principle  of  Christian  theology 
but  made  large  contributions  to  the  material  ele¬ 
ment.  The  ethical  theism  of  Plato  seemed  to  be 
the  philosophical  counterpart  of  the  Jewish  religious 
doctrine;  and  his  conception  of  the  way  of  salvation 
as  conformation  to  the  character  of  God,  and  of  the 
goal  as  an  eternal  existence  of  the  pure  soul  with 
God,  was  the  sublimation  of  the  doctrine  of  the 
mysteries.  Christian  mysticism  was  throughout 
Neoplatonic;  the  earliest  compendium  of  Christian 
morals  was  based  upon  the  ethics  of  the  Stoic 
Panaetius  through  Cicero’s  Be  Officiis. 

The  intellectual  victory  of  Christianity  over  all 
the  rival  salvations  of  the  time  was  due  to  the  fact 
that  it  alone  offered  not  merely  a  way  of  salvation 
but  a  philosophy  of  salvation. 


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